2000

Comments

1. Michael Herdegen - November 8, 2005 @ 2:26 pm

   If I offended, I apologize.

   The intent was to repeat a point that I’d made many times before, and I was attempting to avoid being too repetitive.

   The point is this: You don’t appear to have processed the WMD info at all.

   There are some valid disputes one can have with Blix’s report, and what it showed, the primary one being a position that you already hold – that what was found was insufficiently serious to warrant an invasion.

   However, to continue to claim that there was no evidence of WMD, or that Bush knew that no WMD would be found, is NOT A VALID POSITION, assuming that one wishes to remain within the bounds of a shared reality.

   The undisputable reality is as I have stated above, that bio and chem warfare programmes and substances were found, that illegal weapons systems were found, and that Saddam both refused to cooperate fully, and was unconvincing in his efforts to show that he was innocent.

   I don’t believe that the Bush admin, and all who labor in it, are pure of heart or deed.
   I really like Bush, and I admire and respect Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Rove, Powell, Wolfowitz, et al., but I don’t believe that they’re incapable of making mistakes, or of putting some other agenda above what might be the absolute best policy for the nation.

   It’s just that I don’t believe that they’re part of an evil cabal of omniscient plotters seeking to install a Fascist police state.

   They truly do seek to do right by America and her peoples, but even in the best of times, what that is, and how it should be accomplished, is very much open to debate.

   In this forum, I’m usually cast in the role of defender, and so the nuances of my support for the Bush admin tend to get lost.

   But I won’t cry if DeLay gets what he so richly deserves, and if there were justice in this world, Abramoff would get the Nguyen Loc Loan treatment.

2. Michael Herdegen - November 8, 2005 @ 2:43 pm

   Your “Real Texas Cowboy” is an idiot.

   While one may disagree about the wisdom of what Bush is trying to do, simply studying Bush’s bio and accomplishments, whether in business, as Gov. of Texas, or as President, one cannot help but come to the conclusion that Bush is a shrewd and talented dealmaker and politician, as well as being a leader who inspires great personal loyalty.

   Those who insist otherwise are simply displaying their own psychological needs, since history completely refutes them.

   The greatest “accomplishments” of this administration to date are tax-cuts for the rich and no-bid contracts for Cheney and Company.

   That’s brainless oppositional boilerplate that you ought to be ashamed of posting – but unfortunately, a listing of the Bush admin’s many accomplishments will have to wait for another time.

3. Tam O’Tellico - November 8, 2005 @ 6:15 pm

   You are the one that has to be kidding.

   M: “Bush’s bio and accomplishments, whether in business, as Gov. of Texas, or as President, one cannot help but come to the conclusion that Bush is a shrewd and talented dealmaker and politician, as well as being a leader who inspires great personal loyalty. Those who insist otherwise are simply displaying their own psychological needs, since history completely refutes them.”

   Based on his record, I wouldn’t hire him to pick up the garbage, and without his connections neither would anyone else. Take another look:

   Bush’s Resume:

   *Partied my way thru college.
   *Turned down by University of Texas School of Law.
   *Got in Harvard Business School thru influence-peddling.
   *At least one conviction for drunk driving in Maine (Texas driving record has been erased and is not available).
   *Admittedly inhaled — deeply, won’t come clean about snorting.
   *AWOL from National Guard during time of war.
   *Refused drug test or to even answer any questions about drug use.
   *Produced a Hollywood slasher B movie.
   *Bought an oil company, but couldn’t find oil even in Texas (thanks to Daddy and his rich friends, I was able to pull off this stunt three times!); company went bankrupt shortly after I sold all my stock. Barely escaped prosecution for SEC violations.

   Note: All records of any SEC investigations into my insider trading or bankrupt companies are sealed in secrecy and un-available for public view. All minutes of meetings for any public corporation I served on the board of are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view.

   *Ran for congress and lost.
   *Bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a sweetheart deal that took land using tax-payer money. Still owe the city of Arlington money. Biggest move: Traded Sammy Sosa to the Chicago White Sox.
   *With father’s help (and his name) was elected Governor of Texas.

   Accomplishments as Governor:
   *Changed pollution laws for power and oil companies and made Texas the most polluted state in the Union.
   *Replaced Los Angeles with Houston as the most smog ridden city in America.
   *Cut taxes and left state of Texas in debt to the tune of billions in borrowed money.
   *Set record for most executions by any Governor in American history.
   Note:All records of my tenure as governor of Texas have been spirited away to my fathers library, sealed in secrecy and un-available for public view.
   *Became president after losing the popular vote by over 500,000 votes, thanks to my father’s Supreme Court appointees.

   Accomplishments as President:

   General:
   *First president in US history to enter office with a criminal record.
   *First year in office, set record for most vacation days of any president in US history.
   *Set the record for most campaign fund-raising trips of any president in US history.
   *All-time US (and world) record holder for most corporate campaign donations. Biggest life-time campaign contributor is close friend Kenneth Lay, former CEO of Enron Corporation).
   *Spent more money on polls and focus groups than any president in US history.
   *First president in decades to execute a federal prisoner.
   *Appointed more convicted criminals to administration positions than any president in US history.
   *Set record for the least number of press conferences of any president since the advent of television.
   *Signed more laws and executive orders circumventing the Constitution than any president in US history.
   *Set all-time record for number of administration appointees who violated US law by not selling huge investments in corporations bidding for government contracts.
   *Removed more checks and balances, and have the least amount of congressional oversight of any presidential administration in US history.
   *First US president to establish a secret shadow government.
   *Removed more freedoms and civil liberties for Americans than any other president in US history.
   *In a little over two years, created the mose divided country in decades, possibly the most divided the US has been since the civil war — certainly the most divided since Viet Nam.
   *Changed US policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts.
   *Havethe most secretive and unaccountable adminstation of any in US history.
   *Has the richest cabinet members of any administration in US history. (the ‘poorest’ multi-millionaire, Condoleezza Rice has an Chevron oil tanker named after her).

   Economy:
   *Entered office with the strongest economy in US history and in less than two years turned every single economic category heading straight down. *Blamed it all on my predecessor and people actually bought it.
   *Spent the surplus and may yet bankrupt the treasury.
   *Shattered record for biggest annual deficit in history.
   *During first two years in office, over 2 million Americans lost their job.
   *Cut unemployment benefits for more out of work Americans than any president in US history.
   *Set economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12 month period.
   *Set record for most foreclosures in a 12 month period.
   *Set the all-time record for biggest annual budget spending increases, more than any president in US history.

   National Security:
   *After taking the entire month of August off for vacation, presided over the worst security failure in US history.
   *In the 18 months following the 911 attacks, successfully prevented any public investigation into the biggest security failure in the history of the United States.
   *Created the largest government department bureaucracy in the history of the United States.
   *First president to run and hide when the US came under attack (and then lied saying the enemy had the code to Air Force 1)

   Energy:
   *Presided over the biggest energy crises in US history and refused to intervene when corruption was revealed.
   *Presided over the highest gasoline prices in US history and refused to use the national reserves as past presidents have until the political heat got unbearable.

   Note:Any records or minutes from meetings I or my VP attended regarding public energy policy are sealed in secrecy and un-available for public review.

   Foreign Policy:
   *Attacked and occupied two countries.
   *Cut healthcare benefits for war veterans.
   *Set the all-time record for most people worldwide to simultaneously take to the streets to protest me (15 million people), shattering the record for protest against any person in the history of mankind. (http://www.hyperreal.org/~dana/marches/)
   *Dissolved more international treaties than any president in US history.
   *First president in US history to have the United Nations remove the US from the human rights commission.
   *First president in US history to have the United Nations remove the US from the elections monitoring board.
   *Rendered the United Nations irrelevant.
   *Withdrew from the World Court.
   *Refused to allow inspectors access to US prisoners of war and by default no longer abides by the Geneva Conventions.
   *First president in US history to refuse United Nations election inspectors (during the 2002 US elections).
   *First president in US history to unilaterally attack a sovereign nation against the will of the United Nations and the world community.
   *In less than a year, lost world-wide sympathy for the US after 9-11 and made the US the most resented country in the world (possibly the biggest diplomatic failure in US and world history).
   *My policy of ‘dis-engagement’ created the most hostile Israeli-Palestine relations in at least 30 years.
   *First US president in history to have a majority of the people of Europe (71%) view presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and stability.
   *Failed to fulfill pledge to get Osama Bin Laden ‘dead or alive’.
   *Failed to capture the anthrax killer who tried to murder the leaders of our country at the United States Capitol building. After all this time, srill have no leads and zero suspects.

   Personal references:
   My dad (I hope) or James Baker. They can be reached at their offices at the Carlyle Group for war-profiteering.

4. Tam O’Tellico - November 8, 2005 @ 8:38 pm

   Michael,

   If you or anyone else really wants an answer to why we found no WMD in Iraq, read this very carefully.

   Yes, They Lied
   By William Rivers Pitt
   t r u t h o u t | Perspective
   Tuesday 08 November 2005

   “The President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense would not assert as plainly and bluntly as they have that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction if it was not true, and if they did not have a solid basis for saying it.” – Ari Fleischer, 12/4/2002

   Find a defender of the White House on your television these days, and you are likely to hear them blame Bill Clinton for Iraq. Yes, you read that right. The talking point du jour lately has focused on comments made by Clinton from the mid-to-late 1990s to the effect that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was a threat. The pretzel logic here, of course, is straightforward: this Democratic president thought the stuff was there, and that justifies the claims made by the Bush crew over the last few years about Iraqi weapons.
   Let’s take a deeper look at the facts. Right off the bat, it is safe to say that Clinton and his crew had every reason to believe Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction during the 1990s. For one thing, they knew this because the previous two administrations – Reagan and Bush – actively assisted the Hussein regime in the development of these programs. In other words, we had the receipts.
   After the first Gulf War, the United Nations implemented a series of weapons inspections under the banner of UNSCOM, and scoured Iraq for both weapons and weapons production facilities. They lifted bombed buildings off their foundations, they used a wide range of detection technologies, and after seven years of work, they disarmed Iraq.
   A good place to start any detailed discussion of this matter is with former UNSCOM chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who spent seven years in Iraq searching out and destroying Iraq’s weapons and weapons manufacturing capabilities. “After 1998,” Ritter reports in a book I wrote in 2002 titled War on Iraq, “Iraq had been fundamentally disarmed. What this means is that 90%-95% of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capability, including all of their factories used to produce chemical, biological, nuclear long-range ballistic missiles, the associated equipment of these factories, and the vast majority of the product produced by these factories, had been verifiably eliminated.”
   The Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame scandal that has recently encompassed the White House stems from claims made by Bush in 2003 that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger for use in a nuclear weapons program. In 2002, Ritter described the status of Iraq’s nuclear program. “The infrastructure, the facilities, had been 100% eliminated,” he said. “In this, there is no debate. All of their instruments and facilities had been destroyed. The weapons design facility had been destroyed. The production equipment had been hunted down and destroyed, and we had in place one of the more effective monitoring mechanisms – gamma detection – that we operated in Iraq both from vehicles and airborne, looking for gamma rays that would be emitted if Iraq was seeking to enrich uranium or plutonium. We never found anything. The fact is, in terms of the industrial infrastructure needed by Iraq to produce nuclear weapons, this had been eliminated.”
   Ritter went into great detail on the status of Iraq’s chemical weapons capabilities during our 2002 interview. “The Iraqis were able to produce a nerve agent of sarin and tabun successfully and stabilize it,” said Ritter, “but even stabilized stuff stored under ideal conditions will degenerate within five years. The sarin and tabun were produced in the Muthanna State establishment – a massive chemical weapons factory – and this place was bombed during the Gulf War, and then weapons inspectors came and completed the task of eliminating this facility. What that means is that Iraq lost its sarin and tabun manufacturing base.”
   “Let’s also keep in mind,” he continued, “that we destroyed thousands of tons of chemical agent. It’s not as though we said, ‘Oh we destroyed a factory, now we’re going to wait for everything else to expire.’ No. We had an incineration plant operating full-time for years, burning tons of the stuff every day. We went out and blew up in place the bombs and missiles and warheads filled with this agent. We emptied out SCUD missile warheads filled with this agent. We destroyed this stuff – we hunted it down and we destroyed it.”
   “Now, there are those who say that the Iraqis could have hid some of this from us,” continued Ritter. “The problem with that scenario is that whatever they diverted would have had to have been produced in the Muthanna State establishment, which means that once we blew up the Muthanna State establishment, they no longer had the ability to produce new agent, and in five years science takes over. Sarin and tabun will degrade and become useless sludge. It’s no longer a viable chemical agent that the world needs to be concerned about.”
   “So,” concluded Ritter, “all this talk about Iraq having chemical weapons – most of it is based upon speculation that Iraq could have hid some of this from UN weapons inspectors. That speculation is no longer valid, not in terms of the Iraqi ability to hide this stuff from inspectors – although I believe we did such a good job of inspecting Iraq that if they had tried to hide it, we would have found it. But let’s just say that they did try to hide it, and we never found it. So what? It’s gone today, so let’s throw out that hypothetical. It’s not even worth the time to talk about it anymore.”
   On the subject of Iraqi biological weapons, Ritter said in 2002, “The two main biological weapons weaponized by the Iraqis were anthrax and botulinin toxin. Both factories have been destroyed, the means of production destroyed, and even if Iraq was able to hide these weapons, they’re useless today. For Iraq to have biological weapons today, they would have had to reconstitute a biological manufacturing base. And again, biological research and development was one of the things most heavily inspected by weapons inspectors. We blanketed Iraq – every research and development facility, every university, every school, every hospital, every beer factory, anything with a potential fermentation capability was inspected, and we never found any evidence of ongoing research and development or retention.”
   That’s a lot of information, so let’s boil it down. Yes, Iraq was at one time in the business of manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. By 1998, however, those weapons had been destroyed. The manufacturing base for the production of these weapons had been destroyed. Even if Iraq had been able to squirrel away a portion of these weapons, the basic chemistry involved means that the stuff degraded to utter uselessness within five years. Without a manufacturing base for the production of weapons material, said base having been eliminated by 1998, anything stashed away was pudding by 2003.
   If Bush’s people are going to argue that invading Iraq in 2003 because of weapons of mass destruction was the responsible thing to do, they must certainly acknowledge that the efforts of the Clinton administration and UNSCOM to eliminate these weapons was also responsible. The tough talk from the Clinton administration in 1998 regarding Iraq’s WMD was of a piece with this process; they were keeping the heat on to make sure the threat was eliminated.
   Flip to the end of the chapter, however, and you’ll come across the pages being left out of the discussion by Bush’s defenders. One, the stuff was destroyed by 1998, a fact that weapons inspections in 2003 could have easily established (and did establish, thanks to Bush’s inspector, Dr. David Kay, who stated bluntly the stuff wasn’t there, but only after the killing had begun). Two, Clinton did not invade Iraq and throw the United States into a ridiculous, endless, bloody quagmire. He managed to disarm Hussein without taking this disastrous step.
   In short, the contortions that defenders of Bush are going through to justify the invasion do not hold water. Further, evidence that the Bush administration lied with their bare faces hanging out to get this war is piling up in snowdrifts.
   Take, for example, the dire claims made by Bush administration officials about the imminent threat posed by Iraq, claims made as early as 2002. “The Iraqi regime,” said Bush in October of 2002, “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas.”
   If the threat was so dire, why is Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s ambassador to Washington in the run-up to the war, claiming that the Bush administration would have been happy to hold off on invading Iraq until after the presidential election? Meyer, according to the UK Guardian, “reveals that Karl Rove, the political advisor to the president, told him there would have been no problem for Mr. Bush in waiting until the end of 2003 or even early 2004 and this would not have risked entanglement in the US presidential campaign.”
   Some dire threat.
   Finally, there is the recent report in the New York Times about an al Qaeda operative captured in 2001 who deliberately lied to US interrogators about an al Qaeda presence in Iraq. The operative, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, was exposed as a liar by the Defense Intelligence Agency in February of 2002. Their report bluntly stated that al-Libi was deliberately misleading interrogators, and any information he provided was not to be trusted. By 2004, al-Libi had completely recanted all of his testimony.
   “The (Defense Intelligence Agency) document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi’s credibility,” reported the Times. “Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi’s information as ‘credible’ evidence that Iraq was training al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons. Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that ‘we’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.'”
   It makes you wonder. Why did al-Libi lie about an al Qaeda presence in Iraq? Did he do this in order to help push the US into an invasion of that country? If true, this means that Bush, by invading Iraq, did exactly what Osama bin Laden wanted him to. He gave bin Laden the war, and the rallying cry, he was looking for. That’s leadership.
   The stuff was destroyed by 1998. Bush and his crew were prepared to delay the invasion if it meant smoother sailing for the election, despite all their claims of an imminent threat. They used a fully discredited source to justify the invasion, even after being told the source was certainly making things up as he went along.

5. lonbud - November 8, 2005 @ 9:44 pm

   I feel bad that I ‘ve been so swamped with work and real life lately i haven’t even been able to participate in my own blog’s dialogue, but I want to thank Michael and Tam for keeping a very high level discussion going and giving some of us hope for the prospects of healing the rift that seems to have torn our nation asunder in recent times.

   After a quick superficial read of what’s got us to here, I just have to say that, despite your willingness to admit the true nefariousness of characters like Delay and Abramoff, Michael, your respect and admiration for BushCo’s central characters is incomprehensible.

   They may not be omnicient plotters seeking to install a Fascist police state, but they have clearly used their power and influence to both pursue reckless personal visions of geopolitical reformation and acted to secure the benefits of public policy for themselves, their allies in business, and those extremely few individuals in this country similarly situated to them.

   While your reasonable man defense of Bush’s going to war over WMD in Iraq may be superficially attractive, it ultimately fails under the syllogistic logic that a reasonable man does not initiate hostilities.

   Tam, you should know that nothing garnered from the Truthout website carries the least bit of authority among those who believe BushCo are just doing the best they can in a dang difficult situation. I know a bunch of so-called right wing blogs that automatically refuse postings with a truthout link in them. Nice job on sticking up for the reality-based perspective, though, and I just have to say I think the “post turtle” analogy is spot on.

6. Tam O’Tellico - November 9, 2005 @ 7:20 am

   Frankly, I think most thinking Americans feel a bit like a post turtle at this moment in our history. It’s hard to know what to do when your next move seems sure to lead to a steep fall.

   While I understand that Truthout has a politcal axe to grind, and while I recognize that William Rivers Pitt is as much an ideologue as the NeoCons, my advice to critics is the same as Michael’s often is to me — don’t dismiss the messenger, address the message.

   I didn’t post this piece to promote Pitt’s ranting, but to answer Michael’s question about what happened to the WMD this administration promised we’d find in Iraq. The hard facts offered by Scott Ritter should at least relieve fears about what happened to this material since it obviously was not in Iraq. Ritter’s answer is plain — it isn’t anywhere because it was in fact destroyed long before our pre-emptive, ill-planned invasion of Iraq.

   Let this be the subject of further discussion, and let us not get sidetracked by a examination of the veracity or motives of Truthout.

7. Michael Herdegen - November 10, 2005 @ 9:45 am

   If the Iraqi WMD aren’t anywhere because they were in fact destroyed long before our pre-emptive, ill-planned invasion of Iraq, then why did the ’02 – ’03 inspections turn up a mustard gas programme, and if Saddam complied with the UN Security Council’s demand to destroy his anthrax and VX nerve agent stores, why was he content to continue to suffer under the crippling UN economic sanctions ?

   Why not just show the UN that he’d complied ?

   Instead, he rufused to turn over requested documents, which is rarely the sign of an innocent person.

   Tam O’Tellico, the “Bush’s Resume” post is so far beneath your standards that I assume that you copied it from somewhere.

   Do you want me to rip it to shreds ?

   Or we could simply agree that as it stands, it’s a laughably shallow attempt to smear one of the most accomplished people in America, and you could pick out some of the items that an adult would find relevant, and we could discuss those.

   I mean, seriously, if we were to dismiss those Members of Congress and the Cabinet who partied their way though college, and perhaps indulged in a little herb, or who drove while drunk, (or who, while driving drunk, plunged off of the roadway into a body of water, and swam away from a drowning female passenger in an act of cowardice that literally sickens me when I think of it), or who got turned down by their first choice of school, or who ever lost even ONE election, (which is the total number of elections that Bush has lost), or who have produced a movie (??? Why in the world is that supposed to be a negative ? And should we include anyone from the worlds of television production or the music industry, as well ?), or who comes from a political family and has a famous last name, (like Al Gore), we’d be looking at holding perhaps 500 Congressional elections, and replacing most of the Cabinet.

   Also, the person who wrote this knows nothing about, (and didn’t bother to look up):

   The military: *AWOL from National Guard during time of war.

   It would take me a couple of paragraphs to explain why this is risible, but trust me, it’s stupid.

   The oil industry: *Bought an oil company, but couldn’t find oil even in Texas

   MOST people can’t find oil in Texas. It’s not like cutting timber in a forest.
   The person who wrote the piece has never heard of wildcatting, nor dry holes, and is probably unaware that there’s 10 times more oil in Colorado, Utah, and Nevada than there is in Texas and Oklahoma.

   Both of those items would only take about fifteen minutes apiece to bone up on enough to avoid those ignominious errors, which is my main complaint about the “Bush’s Resume” piece – the author thinks up a potential point, writes it down, then does NO RESEARCH WHATSOEVER to find out if it’s valid or not, not even applying common sense to each point, since if the point also applies to a majority of the American population, it’s hardly a unique quality of Bush’s, nor likely to be seen as a “failure”.

   Further, why is *Refused drug test or to even answer any questions about drug use supposed to be negative ?
   Bush wasn’t attempting to become an airline pilot.

   The voters can draw their own conclusions from what Bush will or will not do around the drug issue, and then make their choices.
   As it turns out, the voters decided that they didn’t care, the same choice that they made about Clinton’s marijuana and cocaine use.

   *Got in Harvard Business School thru influence-peddling is asinine.

   Plenty of people get into Ivy League schools because of non-academic factors, but is the author seriously contending that Harvard granted Bush a graduate degree because of who his family is ?

   That’s a “black helicopter” level of delusion.

   Anyway, after addressing ONLY the FIRST section, nothing remains of these supposed knocks on Bush.

   The “Accomplishments as President: General, National Security, and Energy” sections are also silly and delusional, as well as containing mostly segments that are prima facie false, and the “Economy” section is in addition so uneducated that I wonder if perhaps the author grew up in a Communist regime, and lacks even the most basic understanding of economics.

   That leaves only the “Accomplishments as Governor” and “Acc. as Pres. – Foreign Policy” sections with at least one segment that has even a shred of credibility as a valid criticism of Bush.

   Seriously, wherever you got this dreck from, don’t use them as a source again, you’ll just be embarrassed by the results.

   The author expends countless pixels in bizarre and fruitless attacks against Bush, and yet completely ignores Bush’s two biggest flaws !!

   ROFL

   lonbud:

   [T]they have clearly used their power and influence to both pursue reckless personal visions of geopolitical reformation and acted to secure the benefits of public policy for themselves, their allies in business, and those extremely few individuals in this country similarly situated to them.

   Or, they’ve used their power and influence to pursue courses of action that only a hyperpower could accomplish, in a valiant attempt to bring peace and prosperity to 400 million people suffering under some of humanity’s most dysfunctional cultures, societies, and governments.

   Since most people have children, how does the overwhelming majority of Americans become the “extremely few” ?

   Or maybe you mean that 10 million people are an “extremely few” number of people, that being the additional number of people who no longer have to pay Federal taxes due to tax changes sought by the Bush admin, and passed by Congress.

   I detailed that on this site a few threads back, I’ll find the reference for you if you want to investigate further.

   [A] reasonable man does not initiate hostilities.

   Yeah, we remember Neville Chamberlain as being one of history’s wisest men, reasonably refraining from dealing with Hitler while Germany was weak.

   That worked out swell.

   Besides, the point is moot when applied to Bush, since Saddam was the one who invaded Kuwait, initiating the hostilities which continued for thirteen years.

   America didn’t just suddenly decide that it would be neat-o to send half a million American service members over to Arabia, to sit in the desert for up to a year.

8. Tam O’Tellico - November 11, 2005 @ 6:12 pm

   Michael,

   Of course you’re right, I didn’t compose the Bush resume, but I must tell you I agree with much of it.

   Let us leave aside the issue of Bush’s prolonged adolescence and shirking of his duty in the National Guard. For his youth, I could forgive him if only he and his friends had sense enough to keep their mouths shut about Kerry’s service. Given his history, if I were him, I would never allow anyone in my campaign to bring up that issue. Guess that shows what I know — or maybe it shows what rabid Bushites don’t know.

   However, Bush’s previous management experience in the private sector is open to discussion, since a President is above all else a manager. Bush’s business record is clearly miserable at best and in fact a fair assessment is that in this arena, he was a total failure. It is also inarguable that he narrowly escaped SEC prosecution after he sold his stock just before one of his companies went belly up. We can argue about that being a common business practice, but there is no argument about it being illegal.

   His one “success” was in fact in the semi-private sector, and while Bush managed to pull of a sweetheart deal that rewarded him handsomely, the city of Arlington was left holding an empty bag and an expensive note.

   All things considered, Bush’s business experience barely warrants a D.

   As for his one term as governor of Texas, the reviews are mixed and opinions fall pretty much along party lines. But on the whole, it is hard to see where the state of Texas benefited financially from his governance. Grade: C.

   Which brings me to his Presidency. I did not vote for him the first time because I considered him utterly unprepared for such a monumental task. Nevertheless, I supported his “police action” in Afghanistan and his pursuit of Osama and company by whatever mean necessary. I was far less enthusiastic about him asking young men and women to sacrifice their lives while granting substantial tax concessions to the wealthiest Americans who were asked to sacrifice nothing.

   Had things continued as they were then, had Bush accomplished what her assured us he would accomplish and brought us the head of Osama and his pack of jackals, even I might have voted for Bush’s re-election.

   But when I witnessed this administration cook evidence and bend it (at least) and sidetrack us in Iraq, when I witnessed the massive corruption from Halliburton to Abramoff, when I witnessed the high-handed politics of Tom Delay et al, the Plame Affair, the FEMA fiasco, and the continued cronyism in the face of that disaster, my worst fears all came to pass. Grade: F.

   You may choose to continue to support this President if you wish, though it is still unclear to me how that is possible for anyone short of single-issue, rabid-right fanatics. In my view, Bush is failing on every count. And should it ever come to light that some of his failures were in fact deceptions, he may do worse than flunk out.

   I know some want to give Bush a chance to “complete the mission”. But it is simply impossible for me to comprehend how anyone can believe that the incompetents who got us into this mess can get us out of it. It’s like suggesting we give Mike Brown a chance to redeem himself at FEMA.

   I have learned this much in life: Good workmen sometimes do bad work because they are only human. But bad workmen never do good work because they are either ignorant or indifferent — and usually both.

9. Bubbles - November 12, 2005 @ 12:57 am

   “The state that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards, and its fighting by fools.”

   — Thucydides

10. Michael Herdegen - November 12, 2005 @ 3:38 am

    You may choose to continue to support this President if you wish, though it is still unclear to me how that is possible for anyone short of single-issue, rabid-right fanatics.

    That’s because you are not as objective and unbiased as you appear to believe that you are.

    Let’s try this: You pick a President or three whose record or bio you like, and we’ll apply the same standards to them that you apply to Bush.
    I think that we’ll find that NO President has been a paragon of success, it’s just that some have been better than others, and some have been LUCKIER than the rest – and some were massively unlucky.

    In most cases, the Presidents that we remember as being good or great Presidents have one or two massive successes that overshadow otherwise mixed records.

    My advice would be NOT to pick Lincoln or Carter, despite the one’s huge victory for America, and the other’s post-Presidential collection of awards and accolades.
    (Not that I believe that Bush the Younger will or deserves to have a Lincolnesque historical legacy).

    [W]hen I witnessed this administration […] sidetrack us in Iraq…

    If Iraq is a sidetrack, what do you believe should be the main event ?

    Al Qaeda thinks that Iraq is “the Show”, so why do YOU believe that America’s enemies know less than you do about their own objectives and cultures ?

    …when I witnessed the massive corruption from Halliburton to Abramoff…

    Corruption, to be sure, but not “massive”.
    Some historic and international perspective would help here.

    Look up the Teapot Dome scandal, the Presidency of Teddy Roosevelt the “Trust Buster”, the “Robber Barons”, Massachusetts’ “Big Dig”, and consider that Saddam distributed two billion plus dollars’ worth of bribes in the recent UN scandal.
    Also, Clinton/Gore accepted MILLIONS in illegal campaign contributions from the “People’s Republic” of China, and the French political elite had a sweet racket going:

    Former Elf executive Alfred Sirven told the court in Paris that much of the $50 milllion he withdrew in cash between 1990 and 1996 were used to fund French political parties and foreign leaders.
    The trial of some 37 Elf managers accused of embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars began [in March of 2003].

    (Elf is the giant French oil company that used to be state-owned).

    And those are just barely brushing the surface of the history of global corruption. We could go on for years studying it.
    If you’re mad because Bush failed to transform American politics into an endeavor only for the pure of heart, welcome to reality & get over it.

    Opportunists congregate wherever there’s power or money, and the U.S. Federal gov’t has massive quantities of both.

    …when I witnessed the high-handed politics of Tom Delay et al….

    And this would differ from previous Congresses, many controlled by Democrats, in which way ?

    …the continued cronyism in the face of that disaster…

    Does “the Clinton White House Travel Office” ring any bells ?

    You know, where the Clintons accused innocent Federal employees of criminal wrongdoing, so that the Clintons could fire them and give the White House travel business to family friends ?

    Cronyism and nepotism are facts of life.
    Again, get over it, because that ain’t gonna change within your lifetime.

    As for [Bush’s] one term as governor of Texas, the reviews are mixed and opinions fall pretty much along party lines.

    No, that’s completely wrong.
    In the first place, Bush served TWO terms, one incompletely because he was elected to the Presidency.

    However, it was his overwhelming re-election victory that set the stage for his victorious Presidential campaign. No re-election, no Presidency.

    Which brings up a question for those who believe that Bush has had everything handed to him on a silver platter, due to his lineage: How exactly did G.H.W. Bush arrange to have his son beat a popular incumbent, Ann Richards ?
    CIA mind control ?
    And, if Bush the Elder could and would do it for George, why not for Jeb, who LOST his first Florida gubernatorial bid ?

    Bush got along well with the then-Democratically-controlled Texas State Legislature, so well that the DEMOCRATIC Speaker endorsed Bush for re-election, over the Dem. candidate.

    So, while those who denigrate Bush’s record as Governor are mostly Democrats, it can hardly be said that opinions break “along party lines”, since plenty of Texas Dems supported Bush.

    The bottom line is, the people of Texas thought that Bush did a good enough job as Governor to overwhelmingly return him to office, as well as to deliver the State of Texas to Bush during both of his Presidential bids.
    Therefore, he must have been a better Governor than you are willing to give him credit for.

    The same cannot be said of Vice President Gore, whose home state of Tennessee DID NOT believe that he would be a good President, and went to Bush in ’00. If Gore had won HIS HOME STATE, he would have been President.

    Let us leave aside the issue of Bush’s prolonged adolescence and shirking of his duty in the National Guard. For his youth, I could forgive him if only he and his friends had sense enough to keep their mouths shut about Kerry’s service. Given his history, if I were him, I would never allow anyone in my campaign to bring up that issue.

    No, let’s NOT leave it aside, since the charges are libelous.

    Bush didn’t bring up the issue of his military service, Kerry did, which as you point out, shows what rabid anti-Bushites don’t know, that people living in glass houses ought not throw bricks.

    Given Kerry’s war record, and what he later said about it, it was stupidity of the highest order to bring it up.
    Kerry was a brave, if somewhat reckless, C.O. in Vietnam, but he wasn’t willing to leave it at that. Like Gore, Kerry was prone to making up self-aggrandizing stories about his experiences and accomplishments, and it’s not a big surprise that he was eventually called on it, proving, for instance, that Kerry never was in Cambodia, as he’d claimed.
    Further, after returning from Vietnam, Kerry testified before Congress that America was making a big mistake, and that the North Vietnamese were just misunderstood lovable lugs, and that if the country were re-unified under North Vietnamese control, nothing much would happen. (As it turned out, South Vietnam did end up under North Vietnamese control, and the resulting bloodbath and twenty-year-long recession showed that as a soothsayer, Kerry made a good sailor).
    Then, Kerry threw someone else’s military medals over the White House fence, claiming that they were his.

    Is it any wonder that most current military members and veterans thought that Kerry was nuts ?

    As for Bush “shirking his duty in the National Guard”, that charge can only be made by someone both profoundly ignorant of how the military operates, and too lazy to look it up.

    The Nat’l Guard and Reserves DO NOT WORK in the same way as do the active forces, where it is a problem if someone takes the day off without permission.

    Bush put in all of the duty-time that he was required to do, within the time frame that he was required to do it in, and he was honorably discharged.
    The fact that he didn’t show up for every drill that he was supposed to is IRRELEVANT, since he made up the time, which is exactly how the Guard and Reserves STILL operate.

    The persistence of this canard is amusing – it really does show how ignorant and uncurious the Left is about the world, since simply talking to someone who’s actually served in the Reserve forces is all that’s required to put this to rest – but many Leftists DON’T KNOW anyone who has put it all on the line in defense of freedom, and don’t see that blind spot as being any kind of negative.

    [I]t is simply impossible for me to comprehend how anyone can believe that the incompetents who got us into this mess can get us out of it.

    That is the crux of our disagreements – you believe that we’re on the brink of an abyss, and I believe that not only are our problems both manageable, and fairly mild by historical standards, but also that they’re getting better, not worse – and most of recorded human history backs my position.

    Would you trade the War on Terror for the Cold War, or Vietnam, or Korea, or WW II, or WW I, or the Civil War, or the Revolutionary War ?

    It’s pretty low-key and bloodless, as wars go.

    America had a gold-rush faux boom in the late 90s, and so today’s economic growth and rate of job creation seem a bit slow, but by any long-term historical standard, we’re doing GREAT.

    Contrary to your earlier assertion that only the rich have benefitted from the Bush admin, tens of millions of low and middle income families have had their Federal tax bill lowered, in many cases to ZERO.

    44 million American households now pay NO Federal income tax.

    It takes a willfully blind person to snivel about how rough we have it today.

    Or, I suppose, a person who came of age after the Berlin Wall fell, and who did very poorly in school, and who believes that History started when they were born, so that they have no points of reference beyond the personal.

11. Michael Herdegen - November 12, 2005 @ 3:47 am

    Bubbles:

    So you would agree with Robert A. Heinlein about the benefits of universal military service, and restricting suffrage to veterans ?

12. Michael Herdegen - November 12, 2005 @ 4:45 am

    Tam O’Tellico:

    Again, regarding Ritter’s absurd claims that Iraq had destroyed all of its WMD by ’98:

    Why did Saddam kick the UN inspectors out, if all of the materials had been destroyed ?

    Ritter offers us this self-serving and delusional assessment: “I believe we did such a good job of inspecting Iraq that if they had tried to hide it, we would have found it.” Of course, Dr. Hans Blix reported to the UN Security Council that such was NOT so, that the ’02 – ’03 inspections, within SIXTY DAYS, had turned up hard evidence of banned bio, chem, and missile programmes. (Earth to Scott Ritter, Earth to Scott Ritter, come in Private Ritter…)

    Anyhow, if we take Ritter at his unreliable word, Saddam had been relieved of his unconventional weaponry by ’98.

    So why then did Saddam suffer for another FOUR YEARS under the UN sanctions, and American and British-enforced no-fly zones ?!?

    I’m very interested in hearing how you explain that little riddle.

13. lonbud - November 12, 2005 @ 7:50 am

    Michael:

    GW Bush is not the antithesis of Neville Chamberlain; Saddam Hussein and whatever “threat” he may have posed to American interests are not equatable with Adolf Hitler.

    Instead, he rufused to turn over requested documents, which is rarely the sign of an innocent person.

    Your boy is the most document-redacting, information-witholding president in history.

    Painting the Iraqi pacification (that one still makes me laugh) as a mop-up operation of the job Poppy left unfinished when Saddam invaded Kuwait is both self-serving and absurd. I stand by my original statement and maintain that a reasonable man does not initiate hostilities.

    Most of your defense of BushCo’s policies and practices stands on two tenets: things have been ever thus; and because he can. Both of which I find facile and regrettably opposed to the supposed mission of making the world a better, safer, more wonderful place.

14. Tam O’Tellico - November 12, 2005 @ 8:58 am

    Michael,

    Much of your argument amounts to “everybody’s doing it”. And as for Bill Clinton, I have made my disgust with him more than plain, so please stop using his failures to excuse Bush’s. Matter of fact, I wish you followed my example and called a spade a spade and a failure a failure regardless of party or political persuasion.

    Yes, Teapot Dome was a terrible scandal, and isn’t it curious that the scandal was over oil during the adminstration of a Republican president who may well have been the worst of all time. I still say this President may well displace Harding if the Halliburton/Iraq War scandals are ever completely exposed. I realize you don’t concur in that opinion.

    Since it is obvious we are from different “planets” as far as Bush is concerned, there doesn’t seem to be much use in continuing our mutual rants. Perhaps we should leave the judgment to history. On the other hand, if intelligent, semi-informed persons such as ourselves perceive current events in such diametrically different ways, it begs the question just how valid history will be.

    I repeat the judgment formed by my personal experience: Good workmen sometimes do bad work because they are only human. But bad workmen never do good work because they are either ignorant or indifferent — and usually both.

15. Bubbles - November 12, 2005 @ 3:22 pm

    Michael Herdegen Says:
    November 12th, 2005 at 3:47 am
    Bubbles:

    “So you would agree with Robert A. Heinlein about the benefits of universal military service, and restricting suffrage to veterans ?”

    In principle yes, ‘Rights’ go hand-in-hand with ‘Duty’/obligations. I think there should be options for young people to serve their county, but none of them should be ‘easy’. I think we’d be a better place for it and yes unless you physically couldn’t perform your ‘Duty’ you should forfeit (among other penalties) your right to vote. I think that’s entirely reasonable. I’ve spent time in many countries that compel national service and in my view they enjoy a far more ‘responsible’ citizenry.

    I also think it is germane to this discussion to contrast this with a worldview never witnessed in all of recorded civilized history in which you can go to war and cut taxes. All the while, espousing policies that “promote an ownership society of personal responsibility”.

    Michael, have a cup of coffee. Its all coming home to roost, its time to accept it and get the ship back on course. In my view it’s going to require cleaning house from the top down. BTW – That includes Democrats that didn’t have that balls to standup and fight this departure from reality.

16. Tam O’Tellico - November 12, 2005 @ 4:01 pm

    I agree in principle — as long as there are no deferments or sweetheart deals for the well-connected. But if public service becomes just one more instance of “birth hath its privileges”, it will achieve the opposite effect from that which is intended — the very real need for people of all socio-economic strata to understand that rights come with civic responsibilities, and that the price for privilege is personal sacrifice. Without this understanding, we do not have a nation or citizens, we merely have an economic system and consumers.

17. Bubbles - November 12, 2005 @ 4:53 pm

    Tam O’Tellico Says:

    “the very real need for people of all socio-economic strata to understand that rights come with civic responsibilities, and that the price for privilege is personal sacrifice. Without this understanding, we do not have a nation or citizens, we merely have an economic system and consumers.”

    To this end while we can debate until we’re typing with nubs differing views of history, hegemony or hubris, as the saying goes, “all politics is local”. The expression surely invites humanistic extension, in that the lives of others can be commoditized but the lives of friends and family cannot. So whether we believe that policy flows from elected leaders or various members of Boards of Directors sending their friends and family to war is just the type of reality based filter that for something as important as war can truly separate necessity from desire.

18. Michael Herdegen - November 13, 2005 @ 11:52 pm

    lonbud:

    Painting the Iraqi pacification (that one still makes me laugh) as a mop-up operation of the job Poppy left unfinished when Saddam invaded Kuwait is both self-serving and absurd.

    Not really.

    With respect, that position can only be taken by those ignorant of what was happening in Iraq and at the UN between ’91 – ’03.
    While the American/British invasion of ’03 was not, strictly speaking, necessary, something would eventually have had to be done about Saddam.
    “Operation Iraqi Freedom” was indeed a direct, if delayed, continuation of “Desert Storm”, and between the two large-scale military ops, we had continuing and constant combat skirmishes between U.S. and Iraqi forces, including an urban bombing ordered by Pres. Clinton.
    We also had a failed attempt to end the conflict through peaceful and diplomatic means, the UN sanctions and weapons inspections/destructions.
    If Saddam had been interested in ending the war, he had MORE than ample opportunity.

    I stand by my original statement and maintain that a reasonable man does not initiate hostilities.

    That’s just foolish.
    A reasonable person avoids initiating hostilities, whenever possible, but sometimes the wisest course is an offensive.

    Most of your defense of BushCo’s policies and practices stands on two tenets: things have been ever thus; and because he can. Both of which I find facile and regrettably opposed to the supposed mission of making the world a better, safer, more wonderful place.

    They are facile, but only because the underlying principles are so basic to human existence.
    You say Bush ought to be burned at the stake, I point out that that although he’s no saint, he’s not bad, as humans go.

    You’d only give him a pass if he were a Paladin of Virtue, and I believe that such a standard is too high.
    That’s why I invited Tam to pick his three fave Presidents – I’m betting that none of them could pass the “Bush test” either.

    The Bush admin is “making the world a better, safer, more wonderful place”.
    You just don’t like HOW he’s doing it.

    Tam O’Tellico:

    Much of your argument amounts to “everybody’s doing it”.

    Not just that, but also, “everyone’s ALWAYS done it”.
    The question is, is it worse now than it usually is ?

    The answer is, No, it’s not.
    Therefore, I see no reason to despair. If you look around the world, you’ll find that “average” incompetence and corruption in America is “sterling conduct” in most places.
    Further, in America, we tend to punish those who are incompetent or corrupt, once they’re found out.

    And as for Bill Clinton, I have made my disgust with him more than plain, so please stop using his failures to excuse Bush’s. Matter of fact, I wish you followed my example and called a spade a spade and a failure a failure regardless of party or political persuasion.

    I do follow your example.
    I just think that you’re mistaken about Bush, Cheney, et al.

    Perhaps we should leave the judgment to history. On the other hand, if intelligent, semi-informed persons such as ourselves perceive current events in such diametrically different ways, it begs the question just how valid history will be.

    Time and thousands of additional opinions tend to have a clarifying effect.

    In the 80s, Reagan was regarded as Bush is today, maybe worse, and by the time he died, fifteen-plus years after leaving office, the general opinion was that he WAS right about the Soviet Union, and about how he confronted them.

    For Bush, the decade after he leaves office will affect how history perceives him.
    If Iraq muddles along, and there are few major terror attacks globally, then he’ll be seen as an effective, dynamic President.
    If not, then not. He’ll be a Hoover.

    Bubbles:

    I agree, the military, Americorps, and the Peace Corps all ought to qualify one for suffrage.

    In fact, I’d be willing to leave out Americorps, since IMO both military service and living for a few years in the third world are both FAR more mind-broadening than teaching poor kids in America.

    However, I wouldn’t make service mandatory and compulsive.

    If some people want to stay second-class citizens, let ’em.
    We only need half of the citizenry to be actively committed to make the nation work.

    After all, only half vote now, WITHOUT having to serve for the privilege.

19. lonbud - November 14, 2005 @ 12:16 am

    Michael:

    something would eventually have had to be done about Saddam.

    Sure, but nowhere was it written that the United States had to be the ones to do it. Far more legitimate and effective it would have been if the Iraqi people themselves did whatever may have had to be done about Saddam.

    A reasonable person avoids initiating hostilities, whenever possible, but sometimes the wisest course is an offensive.

    Perhaps so; this was not one of those times.

    I’m not suggesting Dubya be a Paladin of Virtue, but friend, he is NOT making the world a better, safer, more wonderful place — and you’re darn tootin’ I don’t like how he’s doing whatever it is he thinks he’s doing.

    I’ll stand with Tam on this one and be just fine with History’s judgment on Dubya’s motivations, practices, and effectiveness.

20. Bubbles - November 14, 2005 @ 12:20 pm

    And, I think we’ve had this discussion about Reagan. While he maybe remembered fondly (heck of a guy) and ushered in the Regan/Republican Revolution I’m missing where the scholarly work is giving him a lot of credits for his policies. Besides we’re witnessing the work of many of the very same villains.

21. Bubbles - November 14, 2005 @ 12:43 pm

    Ohh and the whole point is that it must be compulsory.

22. Tam O’Tellico - November 14, 2005 @ 1:49 pm

    Well, let’s start off on a positive note — though I’m sure my opinions will meet with disagreement. The three greatest U.S. Presidents? I can’t limit it to three, since Presidents serve such different roles depending on the times.

    Washington deserves a vaunted place in history for being a true uniter, the likes of which we did not see again until Eisenhower, and may never see again now that “state” religion has brought about the divisiveness the Founding Fathers always feared.

    Jefferson deserves his place both for his accomplishments before becoming President, since those accomplishments served significantly to establish the office and the country. His at the time much-maligned Louisiana Purchase accomplished more with a stroke of the pen than most of the wars we’ve fought before or since.

    (By the way, Hamilton, who would likely have been elected President at some point, seldom gets the credit due him. Without the brilliant economic policies he championed, the United States as we know it would never have existed.)

    Lincoln is an obvious choice because without his leadership there definitely would be no United States as we know it, and had he lived, the history of the United States would have been very different. I maintain the greatest enemy of the South was not Lincoln, but John Wilkes Booth, and rinning a close second for that dubious honor was John C. Calhoun.

    Teddy Roosevelt is not given enough credit for his far-sighted public policies, including the establishment of our greatest national treasure, the very wilderness areas that the present administration is callously despoiling for short-term gain.

    Franklin Roosevelt, love him or hate him, was a giant who not only led the nation through our the great depression, but through our greatest war as well. His establishment of a safety net for all American citizens grants him top-ten status, and I’m saddened that the undoing of this safety net is an avowed aim of many Conservatives, the same radicals who would get us out of the United Nations.

    Harry Truman, once the most under-rated of all American Presidents, has finally gotten his due. His integration of the military (at a time when the Pentagon was foolishly being constructed with separate black and white bathrooms) is a mark of rare courage. He also was the last President before Bill Clinton to understand the necessity of universal health coverage and have the guts to try and do something about it. He is the one who initiated the Cold War plan that eventually brought down the USSR, a fact which Reaganites are loath to acknowledge for some reason.

    It appears Michael expects George W. Bush will one-day join this group and salvage what to most of us is a so-far disastrous Presidency. But it is clear that will only happen if his grand plan for the Mid-East comes to fruition. Well, I wish him (and all of us) well, but I can’t pin my hopes on a leader who has failed us so many times in so many places, a leader who not only doesn’t seem to have a solution, but frequently doesn’t even seem to understand the problem.

23. Michael Herdegen - November 14, 2005 @ 7:38 pm

    Washington and Lincoln have to come in at 1 & 2, on the “Greatest Presidents Ever” list, and FDR has to be somewhere in the top 10, just ahead of Reagan.

    I’m not claiming that Bush will make the top 10, (although it’s possible), but simply that he’ll be remembered as being in the top half, along with his father.

    Clinton, Carter, Ford, Nixon, and LBJ will certainly be in the bottom half, along with the likes of Pierce, Buchanan, Grant, and Harding.

    Truman’s admin may have come up with “containment”, but by the end of the Carter admin, things were looking bleak.
    Reagan was the one who rallied the team in the fourth quarter, and scored the go-ahead goal.

    Bubbles, THAT is the mark of his greatness. Reagan had four big ideas, and he made three a reality, including the two most important and difficult ones.

    Washington isn’t #1 because he was a commanding policy wonk, or because he initiated a thousand and one small changes – he’s The Best Ever because of only two things – but they were the most important two things that any President has yet done.
    (If we exclude the fact that no post-WW II President has started a nuclear holocaust).

    Bubbles, why the compulsory service ?

    It strikes me as being more meaningful if it’s voluntary, and I don’t see what the downside would be.

24. Bubbles - November 14, 2005 @ 10:01 pm

    Editorial – Decoding Mr. Bush’s Denials Published: November 15, 2005

    To avoid having to account for his administration’s misleading statements before the war with Iraq, President Bush has tried denial, saying he did not skew the intelligence. He’s tried to share the blame, claiming that Congress had the same intelligence he had, as well as President Bill Clinton. He’s tried to pass the buck and blame the C.I.A. Lately, he’s gone on the attack, accusing Democrats in Congress of aiding the terrorists.

    Yesterday in Alaska, Mr. Bush trotted out the same tedious deflection on Iraq that he usually attempts when his back is against the wall: he claims that questioning his actions three years ago is a betrayal of the troops in battle today.

    It all amounts to one energetic effort at avoidance. But like the W.M.D. reports that started the whole thing, the only problem is that none of it has been true.

    Mr. Bush says everyone had the same intelligence he had – Mr. Clinton and his advisers, foreign governments, and members of Congress – and that all of them reached the same conclusions. The only part that is true is that Mr. Bush was working off the same intelligence Mr. Clinton had. But that is scary, not reassuring. The reports about Saddam Hussein’s weapons were old, some more than 10 years old. Nothing was fresher than about five years, except reports that later proved to be fanciful.

    Foreign intelligence services did not have full access to American intelligence. But some had dissenting opinions that were ignored or not shown to top American officials. Congress had nothing close to the president’s access to intelligence. The National Intelligence Estimate presented to Congress a few days before the vote on war was sanitized to remove dissent and make conjecture seem like fact.

    It’s hard to imagine what Mr. Bush means when he says everyone reached the same conclusion. There was indeed a widespread belief that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But Mr. Clinton looked at the data and concluded that inspections and pressure were working – a view we now know was accurate. France, Russia and Germany said war was not justified. Even Britain admitted later that there had been no new evidence about Iraq, just new politics.

    The administration had little company in saying that Iraq was actively trying to build a nuclear weapon. The evidence for this claim was a dubious report about an attempt in 1999 to buy uranium from Niger, later shown to be false, and the infamous aluminum tubes story. That was dismissed at the time by analysts with real expertise.

    The Bush administration was also alone in making the absurd claim that Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda and somehow connected to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That was based on two false tales. One was the supposed trip to Prague by Mohamed Atta, a report that was disputed before the war and came from an unreliable drunk. The other was that Iraq trained Qaeda members in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Before the war, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that this was a deliberate fabrication by an informer.

    Mr. Bush has said in recent days that the first phase of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation on Iraq found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence. That is true only in the very narrow way the Republicans on the committee insisted on defining pressure: as direct pressure from senior officials to change intelligence. Instead, the Bush administration made what it wanted to hear crystal clear and kept sending reports back to be redone until it got those answers.

    Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence, said in 2003 that there was “significant pressure on the intelligence community to find evidence that supported a connection” between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The C.I.A. ombudsman told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the administration’s “hammering” on Iraq intelligence was harder than he had seen in his 32 years at the agency.

    Mr. Bush and other administration officials say they faithfully reported what they had read. But Vice President Dick Cheney presented the Prague meeting as a fact when even the most supportive analysts considered it highly dubious. The administration has still not acknowledged that tales of Iraq coaching Al Qaeda on chemical warfare were considered false, even at the time they were circulated.

    Mr. Cheney was not alone. Remember Condoleezza Rice’s infamous “mushroom cloud” comment? And Secretary of State Colin Powell in January 2003, when the rich and powerful met in Davos, Switzerland, and he said, “Why is Iraq still trying to procure uranium and the special equipment needed to transform it into material for nuclear weapons?” Mr. Powell ought to have known the report on “special equipment”‘ – the aluminum tubes – was false. And the uranium story was four years old.

    The president and his top advisers may very well have sincerely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But they did not allow the American people, or even Congress, to have the information necessary to make reasoned judgments of their own. It’s obvious that the Bush administration misled Americans about Mr. Hussein’s weapons and his terrorist connections. We need to know how that happened and why.

    Mr. Bush said last Friday that he welcomed debate, even in a time of war, but that “it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began.” We agree, but it is Mr. Bush and his team who are rewriting history.

25. lonbud - November 14, 2005 @ 9:05 pm

    Well, first let me make sure I understand the topic vis a vis service. Are we suggesting that sufferage be predicated on some sort of service, be it military or something-other-than?

    I agree with Michael that the idea of service could be easily tarnished by making it compulsory, and I’m actually intrigued by the idea of tying the right to vote to some kind of service obligation.

    But it would have to be something one could fulfill prior to one’s 18th birthday, right? And it would have to allow service to one’s immediate community in lieu of such to some national goal, wouldn’t it?

    As for the Presidential sweepstakes, I’ll buy the ticket, although it’s a similar endeavor and much more fun to play “Who’s the Prettiest Girl?” at the beach.

    So we’re putting the original GW in the top slot just because he had the balls to take the job in the first place, eh? That, and he was a first rate commander who got more out of less than did his better-funded and better-equipped Redcoat adversaries. Well, why quibble?

    Lincoln, too, has to make the Top 5, on the sheer feat of his managing to hold the Nation together, although he also practiced what the Buddhists call “right thought” and “right action,” in addition to his having had the most compelling personal story of any President, what with his doing his homework by candlelight with charcoal on the back of a shovel and all.

    I’m going to buck trend and invite the wrath of oroborous by putting JFK in my Top 5 by virtue of the fact that he, on the force of his charisma alone led the country into the modern age with all the feelings of pride and promise and unlimited opportunity that some people claim Reagan rekindled 20 years later.

    Surely, had Tricky Dick got his mitts on the tiller in 1960, the country would have been set on a very, very different course than the one JFK charted. It is to our great shame and possibly the most tragic event in our entire history that the Forces of Darkness succeeded in cutting JFK’s presidency short that afternoon in Dallas.

    I believe I, too, have to give Teddy R a Top 5 slot for recognizing and attempting to preserve our natural heritage and resources, and his relative FDR probably goes in there as well for leading the country out of the Great Depression and through WWII.

    The bottom half of the Top Ten for me looks like, not necessarily in this order:

    Bill Clinton, both for having a personal story second to no one save Lincoln, and for making a yeoman’s effort to reconcile the country’s best intentions with its tendency toward waste and self-destruction.

    Jefferson, for most of the same reasons Tam enumerated above, and Truman, likewise as well.

    LBJ, for keeping the country together — barely — during the struggle for Civil Rights.

    And Andrew Jackson, because he actually WAS the bad-ass motherf*cker guys like Dutch and Dubya pretend(ed) to be.

    IMHO, history will consign Reagan and both Bushes to the bottom of the heap for their myopic visions of a nation whose greatness derives not from each of its constituent parts, but one whose wealth and worth are the product and province of a small and narrow-minded minority of its citizens.

    Reagan didn’t score any kind of a go-ahead goal against the Russians, he just happened to be standing around when they stepped out of their own end-zone looking to punt.

    Poppy Bush will forever be remembered as the bag man in the election-eve arms for hostages deal with Iran and for puking in the Japanese Prime minister’s lap.

    Junior will be forever remembered as the irresponsible kid who lit the fire of global Islamic terrorism and damn-near burned the whole house to the ground.

    The sad, and not-so-funny thing is, plenty of people still can’t even see or smell the smoke.

26. lonbud - November 14, 2005 @ 10:29 pm

    Uh, yeah.

    Here’s a story from Saturday’s Washington Post that effectively debunks the assertion everyone was working from the same playbook in the run-up to war in Iraq.

    In the end, it doesn’t matter how many Democrats voted to “authorize the use of force,” or how many UN resolutions granted the US authority to go into Iraq. BushCo pursued a doomed policy with poor planning and incompetent execution.

    Over 2000 US service members and countless Iraqi civilians (some number of whom may have actually harbored ill wishes for the US and its infidel allies) have paid with their lives. Generations of Americans to come, as well as generations of Middle East residents, will be paying in ways we can not yet calculate.

27. Tam O’Tellico - November 14, 2005 @ 11:14 pm

    Interesting how the “we don’t want to get into the blame game” White House so quickly changed the tune. In contrast to the reaction when the awful failures of FEMA were exposed, the spin this time out seems to be “congress was to blame, too”. I smell a rat named Karl behind this, but I think his deviousness is finally beginning to wear thin and the American public is finally beginning to awaken to the fact that these guys can run a campaign, but they can’t run a couintry.

    As for Congress, Bush is half-right — which is far ahead of his usual score. Of course Congress didn’t have access to the same information Bush had, but that doesn’t excuse their limp-assed reaction to the information they did have. The simple fact is that the vast majority of members shirked their duty because they didn’t want to face up to the political heat that radiated from 9-11 and distorted almost everyone’s perception in Washington and in America in general. Well, if they can’t stand the heat, They should get the hell out Washington!

    But not everyone’s perception was so distorted. I’ll be happy to forward pieces I wrote before the war urging restraint. My reasons then are the same as they are now: evidence for Saddam wanting WMD may have been strong, but evidence for him having WMD was inconclusive. As for the Saddam/Osama connection, our other supposed initial reason for going to war in Iraq, that was absurd to anyone who understood the nature of either of those beasts. Fanatics can’t afford to be discovered making deals with infidels — unless your Tom Delay or Ralph Reed of the Christian Coaltion.

    My contention then and now was/is that Bush the First was correct in that what would follow Saddam would likely be worse, impossible as that might have seemed to some. Sad to say, I believe that events in Iraq support that view.

    I advocated then and now a policy of containment and heightened alert similar to that which helped us survive 50 years of the cold war. I advocated then and now an expansion of our covert operations and under the radar diplomacywith MidEast states who had at least as much to fear from Islamo-Fascists as we did. Ask the Egyptians, the Jordanians and the Saudis.

    Such a policy may not have been as “glamorous” as the braggadacio and strutting of Banty Rooster Bush, but it would have been much cheaper and more effective. Once Al Queda was neutralized, there would have been plenty of opportunity to deal with Saddam and democracy in the MidEast.

    In the end, that is the only policy that has a chance of succeeding in the MidEast. Certainly, the idea that these people are ready for a real democracy is a fool’s notion. Hell, I’m not sure America is ready for democracy!

28. Tam O’Tellico - November 14, 2005 @ 11:18 pm

    Oh, and meantime, we need to be doing every thing we can do to wean ourselves from the oil teat — something that will never happen under the Big Oil President.

29. Bubbles - November 15, 2005 @ 1:03 am

    Tam O’Tellico

    Are you working under some Zuny alias http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/2925 ?

30. Tam O’Tellico - November 15, 2005 @ 4:26 pm

    Wish I could take credit for the thorough review you cited. I especially liked this quote:

    “As one British scientist put it: “To say they have found enough weapons to kill the world several times over is equivalent to the statement that a man who produces a million sperm a day can thus produce a million babies a day. The problem in both cases is one of delivery systems.” ”

    But alas, I am not the source; I’m just a semi-reformed Yankee struggling to survive as a writer and what passes for a liberal here in the buckle of the Bible belt. Nor do I have no special insight about all this. But truthfully, I don’t think any was needed to make the case against the Iraq War.

    What was needed was guts, something that was tragically lacking from the press, Congress, and frankly, the American people. It’s all too easy to lash out in anger, but if we are to deserve the Christian mantle we proclaim for ourselves as a nation, we should at least be expected to think twice before striking back. But it seems to me most Americans didn’t bother to think at all — which is why so many seem so reluctant to admit their mistake.

    America panicked in the aftermath of 9-11, and in our national rage, we struck out at an easy target. Toppling Saddam presented no challenge — the first Gulf War, when he had a real army and real WMD, was proof of that. America abandoned our long-held principle that proclaimed we didn’t start wars; we finished them. We traded that principle for an ill-formed and unexamined descent into pre-emption, pre-emption based not only on Saddam’s posturing and unproven threats, but as this administration openly argued, pre-emption based on potential threats.

    So what now? What is needed now is an open debate as to whether pre-emption should be a legitimate American foreign policy. If it is, we should expect to be at war forever — or at least until, like the Romans, we run out of warriors and money.

    What is also needed is an acknowledgment by all of us that unlike Saddam and his dubious WMD, terrorism is a very real threat. And we also need to acknowledge that our rash actions in Iraq have worsened the political climate and created global-warming for terrorists.

    Countering terrorism will involve a complex and lengthy battle, a battle that will require us to engage in covert actions, assassinations and other acts we’d rather not acknowledge. But in the end, victory against terrorism will depend far more on the George Smiley’s of the world than the John Wayne’s.

    It will also depend on the will of people in America and many other nations to make sacrifices of our liberties and our treasuries. Welcome to the 21st Century — it looks a lot like the 1st.

31. Michael Herdegen - November 15, 2005 @ 8:11 pm

    lonbud:

    Are we suggesting that suffrage be predicated on some sort of service, be it military or something-other-than?

    Yes.

    It wouldn’t have to be completed prior to one’s 18th birthday, as we could allow people to vote while they’re participating in the qualifying service.
    While local service for all or part would be acceptable to me, I’d really like to see people have to serve at least part of their term somewhere remote from where they’ve grown up, preferrably overseas. There’s nothing like seeing non-First World countries firsthand, to bring gratitude for their birth-fortune to the hearts of young Americans.

    Additionally, although service would be required for suffrage, standing for office should be open to all.
    Let the voters decide whether non-participation in national service is a factor in whom they choose.

    JFK is a top-half President, for the reasons that you cite, but NO WAY is he in the Top Five.
    For one thing, he got us into Vietnam, and we all know how well THAT went. (Which is to say, mission accomplished, [we bled Communist China white, and gave the USSR pause in their global expansion plans], but the price was very high, mostly in terms of national confidence and willingness to engage the world, which is what Reagan gave back to us).

    Of course, he did have The Best Presidential Mistress Ever, so that bumps him up a few notches.
    Also, he was a tax-cutter, and tough on nat’l defense.

    While Dallas was tragic, “possibly the most tragic event in our entire history” is such over-the-top hyperbole that you must have been chuckling as you typed it.

    If JFK had lived, his legacy would have fallen far short of the myth that’s grown up around him.

    I mean, c’mon, a Top Five of GW, AL, JFK, TR, and FDR ?
    JFK was no Jefferson, nor was TR for that matter.

    I’m glad to see that Wilson doesn’t make your list. He had principles, and fought the good fight, but in the end was too inflexible to make a great President.

    It’s ironic that you’d write Bill Clinton, both for having a personal story second to no one save Lincoln, and for making a yeoman’s effort to reconcile the country’s best intentions with its tendency toward waste and self-destruction, since “Slick Willy” is the poster-child for waste and self-destruction.
    Also, that “personal story second to no one save…” bit isn’t quite true. Yes, WJC was the son of an alcoholic, and mostly raised by a single mother, but he wasn’t exactly raised in grinding poverty, nor did he lack access to formal education.
    Many Presidents were born into humble surroundings, or into the middle class, and many had tragedy or misfortune strike themselves or their families.

    That said, for me Clinton does exemplify the adages “Anyone can become POTUS”, and “A winner never quits”. Despite not having an especially deprived childhood, Clinton did rise from humble beginnings to become a very successful Governor, and he was bold enough to run against Bush the Elder when the incumbent looked invincible.
    Then, he stuck out the campaign through some very embarrassing and potentially devastating revelations, and THEN he got incredibly lucky: A crazy billionaire put a fork in G.H.W. Bush for Clinton.

    However, Clinton lands in my bottom half for a number of reasons.
    First, he was a caretaker President. No big challenges occurred on his watch. The economy was booming, which made governing easy.
    Then, some of the problems that came up during his admin he put off for future Presidents: UbL, al Qaeda, and North Korea being prime examples.
    So, he had as much good luck as Carter had bad, and didn’t fix the most knotty problems.

    Secondly, he was a really smart, super talented person and politician, who didn’t do much with his opportunities.
    On top of squandering his time as the Most Powerful Person on Earth, he got impeached by Congress, and had his law license suspended by his home state of Arkansas.
    All of that makes him similar to Grant: A great guy who was a poor President.

    Reagan didn’t score any kind of a go-ahead goal against the Russians, he just happened to be standing around when they stepped out of their own end-zone looking to punt.

    Immediately before Reagan, during the Carter admin, the USSR was expanding its Empire.
    Reagan very publicly started the “Star Wars” SDI, called out the Soviet Union as “an Evil Empire”, and sold the Kremlin on the idea that the SDI worked by offering to give up ALL American nuclear warheads.
    A year after Reagan left the White House, the Berlin Wall came down, and three years later the Soviet Union was no more.

    That ain’t no coincidence.

    Poppy Bush will forever be remembered as the bag man in the election-eve arms for hostages deal with Iran and for puking in the Japanese Prime minister’s lap.

    Yeah, that was pretty funny.

    Bush the Elder’s pathetic “out-of-the-loop” excuse caused me to vote against him twice, but nonetheless he handled both the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the domestic side pretty well, and so ends up in my top half.

    Junior will be forever remembered as the irresponsible kid who lit the fire of global Islamic terrorism and damn-near burned the whole house to the ground.

    Puh-lease.
    What you mean is that YOU became aware of global Islamic terror during the Bush Presidency.
    Just because you don’t know about something, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist until you do find out about it.

    The “fire of global Islamic terrorism” was lit in the 80s, began to be directed against American targets in the early 90s, and came to U.S. shores in ’96.
    It was in part Clinton’s response to the fire of global Islamic terror that lands him firmly in my bottom half.

    Bubbles:

    Yeah, Stephen Zunes is quite the writer – given to wild flights of fancy and also to stating the obvious. (At least, as displayed in this effort).
    From the article [all emph. add.]:

    The details revealed thus far from the investigation that led to the five-count indictment against I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby seem to indicate that the efforts to expose the identity of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson went far beyond the chief assistant to the assistant chief. Though no other White House officials were formally indicted, the investigation appears to implicate Vice President Richard Cheney and Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s top political adviser, in the conspiracy.

    In other words, Mr. Zunes can’t bring himself to believe that the investigation didn’t bring back the head of Vice President Cheney, so although “no other White House officials were formally indicted”, there still “seems to be” the “appearance” of “a conspiracy”. (There must be a diabolical conspiracy in here somewhere, there just HAS to be…)

    Pure unsubstantiated libel, shrouded by CYA qualifiers.

    [T]he Bush administration was determined to go to war regardless of any strategic or legal justification…

    Since there was BOTH strategic and legal justification, Mr. Zunes has just written “The Bush admin was determined to go to war, with justification”.
    Way to go, Zuney !!

    …White House officials deliberately exaggerated the threats posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in order to gain congressional and popular support to invade that oil-rich country.

    Like, duh.

    Exactly as was done prior to Desert Shield/Storm, Vietnam, Korea, WW II… The Spanish American War… In Athens during the Peloponnesian War…

    It’s what leaders do, regardless of whether it’s a net good or not.

    And, what’s with noting that Iraq is “oil rich” ?

    The fact that the region is filthy oil rich is very pertinent to why America and the UK are in Iraq, and why anyone in North America, Europe, or Asia cares what happens to the backward folk of the non-Mediterranian Middle East, but we’d still be in Iraq even if all that was buried deep under Iraq’s sand was more sand.
    (You don’t suppose that Mr. Zunes was attempting to imply that America invaded Iraq in order to seize Iraq’s oil reserves, do you? That would be an ignorant and childish analysis, also well-known to be false by 2005…)

    As for “Editorial – Decoding Mr. Bush’s Denials Published: November 15, 2005”, Congress’ report on pre-war intel concluded that, indeed, the CIA and other U.S. intel agencies had fallen down on the job, and that the Bush admin had NOT altered or massaged any intel – as the author herself notes, effectively negating most of her essay – but no doubt she had a certain word-count to meet, so…

    Where the author states that “Mr. Clinton looked at the data and concluded that inspections and pressure were working – a view we now know was accurate.“, she is displaying incredible ignorance.
    Dr. Hans Blix put paid to all that willfull fantasizing in Jan. of ’03 – page up-thread to get a link to his report to the UN Security Council, wherein he speaks of Iraq’s current WMD and missile programmes and stockpiles.

    “France, Russia and Germany said war was not justified.” Which had nothing to do with the fact that they were all selling prohibited items to Iraq, and were heavy recipients of Saddam’s oil-for-food bribes, right ?
    (Yes, Halliburton, headed by Dick Cheney, also sold Iraq stuff, but they went through the UN, and were authorized to do so, and sold only approved items).

    lonbud, when you write “Generations of Americans to come, as well as generations of Middle East residents, will be paying in ways we can not yet calculate”, you should substitute “benefit” for “be paying”, to make it accurate.

    Tam O’Tellico:

    Well, if they can’t stand the heat, They should get the hell out Washington!

    Although we disagree about what they ought to be doing, and how they ought to accomplish it, we can agree that they ought to do something beyond angling for re-election.
    (Which, btw, is one reason why Kerry is/was so lame… He’s been in the Senate for TWENTY YEARS, and he’s accomplished about as much as the Congressional Pages have).

    I advocated then and now an expansion of our covert operations and under the radar diplomacy with MidEast states who had at least as much to fear from Islamo-Fascists as we did.

    That’s a good idea, and we have in fact done that, although we’ve not bothered with under-the-radar diplomacy, opting instead for on-the-table diplomacy.

    [E]vidence for Saddam wanting WMD may have been strong, but evidence for him having WMD was inconclusive.

    My contention then and now was/is that Bush the First was correct in that what would follow Saddam would likely be worse, impossible as that might have seemed to some. Sad to say, I believe that events in Iraq support that view.

    Then please address the 27 Jan ’03 Blix report to the UN Security Council, as well as these:

    Michael Herdegen Says:
    November 12th, 2005 at 4:45 am

    Tam O’Tellico:

    Again, regarding Ritter’s absurd claims that Iraq had destroyed all of its WMD by ‘98: Why did Saddam kick the UN inspectors out, if all of the materials had been destroyed ?

    Ritter offers us this self-serving and delusional assessment: “I believe we did such a good job of inspecting Iraq that if they had tried to hide it, we would have found it.” Of course, Dr. Hans Blix reported to the UN Security Council that such was NOT so, that the ‘02 – ‘03 inspections, within SIXTY DAYS, had turned up hard evidence of banned bio, chem, and missile programmes. (Earth to Scott Ritter, Earth to Scott Ritter, come in Private Ritter…)

    Anyhow, if we take Ritter at his unreliable word, Saddam had been relieved of his unconventional weaponry by ‘98.So why then did Saddam suffer for another FOUR YEARS under the UN sanctions, and American and British-enforced no-fly zones ?!?

    I’m very interested in hearing how you explain that little riddle.

    And:

    Michael Herdegen Says:
    November 7th, 2005 at 8:23 pm

    [Y]ou cannot call a democratically-elected government, operating under a popularly-ratified constitution, as “worse” than living under an oppressive, capricious, sadistic tyrant that you yourself would be willing to have assassinated. [As you stated in a previous post].

    WHY do you not believe the UN Weapons Inspectors ?
    WHY do you believe that Saddam was content to both give up his WMD and remain under UN sanction ?
    WHY do you believe that the Iraqis were better off under Saddam ?

    I enjoy your writing style, and of course we may come to differing conclusions from the same fact-set, but if you’re not even going to process the information and arguments that I present, then there’s not much point in a continuing dialogue.

32. Michael Herdegen - November 15, 2005 @ 9:09 pm

    Tam O’Tellico:

    [W]e should at least be expected to think twice before striking back.

    We did.
    The Taliban we took down almost immediately – Saddam was given a “last chance” warning, and an opportunity to go into exile.
    We didn’t strike Iraq until eighteen months after 9/11.

    Additionally, the choice of targets was not random.
    Saddam was an avowed enemy of the U.S., had attempted to assassinate a former POTUS, had been in continuous low-level military conflict with America for over a decade, had NOT abided by the terms of the ’91 cease-fire, and was still under UN sanction.

    A parolee who doesn’t report in may get back-burnered, but that doesn’t mean that they have any right to complain if the SWAT team eventually breaks down the door.
    “Out of sight, out of mind” does NOT mean “out of trouble”.

    What Saddam critically failed to understand was that 9/11 cleared the way for Bush to act far more agressively than would have been possible sans 9/11, and therefore Saddam tried some dodges that had been effective before, instead of taking Bush seriously.

    [I]n our national rage, we struck out at an easy target. Toppling Saddam presented no challenge…

    Oh yeah ?
    Then why the estimates of tens of thousands of American dead, if we attacked ?
    Why the calls for 100,000 more troops than we actually used in the attack ?

    Just because it turned out to be a cakewalk DOES NOT MEAN that we expected that to be true – and we didn’t.

    What is needed now is an open debate as to whether pre-emption should be a legitimate American foreign policy. If it is, we should expect to be at war forever — or at least until, like the Romans, we run out of warriors and money.

    It is a legitimate American foreign policy, and you should expect to see a lot more of it in coming decades.
    That’s mostly because it’s going to get a lot cheaper in blood and treasure, so we won’t have to worry much about running out of either, nor much about the domestic political fallout.

    The enormous gulf between America and almost anywhere that we might intervene is growing like crazy, both economically and technologically.

    If, in thirty years, we find ourselves pacifying some African or Middle Eastern hellhole, the first invasion wave will consist of remotely-controlled, uncrewed aircraft and tanks, which will be equipped with adaptive camouflage. (Think of the movie Predator, only not as good).
    Our troops will be sitting in safety, while the indigenous troops engage the robots with… Small arms based on WWII designs, and maybe some twenty year old tanks.

    In the future, three divisions of U.S. forces will be able to invade and occupy someplace like Iraq.

    In the meantime, the U.S. per-capita GNP is around $ 37,000.
    If history is any guide, by 2080 it’ll be $ 150,000, in 2005 dollars.
    We’ll be able to buy and deploy a LOT of robots and telepresent devices.

33. Michael Herdegen - November 15, 2005 @ 10:35 pm

    On the topic of appreciating America, here’s an excerpt from a letter from a person who’s been around:

    It is these inefficiencies that are difficult to explain to people who say things starting with “All they have to do is….” to solve a problem. They are thinking like Americans.

    I remember when we lived in Samoa, our house was considered to be “American” style. But still, the floors were bare concrete. The shower was in the bathroom, and the bathroom was inside, unlike traditional Samoan homes, where the bathroom is never in the place where you live, nor is the kitchen. A bathroom smells bad, and a kitchen makes it hot. Naturally, they should be separate from each other and separate from the house, in the Samoan way of thinking. And that makes sense when your home has no walls, but only screens hanging from the ceiling that are woven from palm fronds or something natural.

    Our shower was inside, but it was a cement cubicle with a spigot high in one wall. This was not a shower head. It was a spigot such as one could screw a hose to in the U.S. Water fell from it in one stream of cold water. No hot water. It drained into a drain in the floor. All the drains in the bathroom and kitchen drained into pipes… but the pipes ended in the back yard. So, if you were washing dishes from a meal with rice, little rice grains would be in your back yard when you were done. Heaven only knows where the toilet flushed to… but I suspect a nearby stream.

    In Antigua it was much the same. In both places, electricity was unreliable, and apt to just go off at any time and stay off for several hours. Or days. Roads may or may not be paved. Corruption and nepotism was the norm. Accepted and expected. If I went to the electric company to pay the bill, I may stand at the counter for fifteen minutes while a clerk chatted on the phone with family or friend. When I finally would ask if I could pay my bill, I was given a look like “WHAT is your PROBLEM??!! I’m not done talking with my friend yet. It would be more polite of you to wait, but you obviously do not have the manners of a child.”
    I think it would be instructive if every American senior in high school was required to spend the last year in a third-world country with very little money. They would really appreciate what they have here and do not even think about, it is so expected as a right.

    Even people living in pretty bad slums would know that they at least have internet free at the library… they have a library. They have (mostly) lighted paved streets, electricity, clean water, telephones nearby, and fire, ambulance, and police (usually) handy, as well as bus lines if they have no car. Their schools are provided at no fee, and the teachers are actually paid, and on time. The schools have working toilets, too. In Nolayan’s elementary school in Pava’ia’i, boys just stood at the door and peed into the swamp all over the floor in the normally out-of-order common bathroom building. In Antigua, the ladies’ bathroom at the college seldom worked.

    How is the litter situation there? [In Iraq]. I remember when there began to be signs along U.S. highways threatening stiff fines for littering the highways. Even then, people still littered. It was only after a decade of teaching children about littering being offensive, that American streets and roads became relatively free of litter. When I wanted to take a picture of the amazingly turquoise and aqua blue water of Samoa’s bays, or Antiguas’, with the varied green of lush foliage at the bottom of the picture, I’d have to make sure the camera was pointing high enough to avoid the thick litter everywhere. It was kind of amazing to watch kids with snacks waiting for a bus: they’d eat and naturally throw the wrappers onto the ground, totally unaware of doing anything “uncivilized.”

    But these things can be learned.

    – Dr. C.A. “Lee” Hathaway

34. Tam O’Tellico - November 15, 2005 @ 11:10 pm

    Michael,

    You need to lay off the Asimov for awhile, and the movie you should be referring to is Star Wars not Predator. Better yet, go watch I Robot! Maybe we should start cloning for military purposes. But people can’t even program a VCR, so how are they going to program their clones?

    You seem to be siding with the NeoCons and welcoming Pax Americana. I say a few more coffins (even if this administration is too gutless to let them be photographed), and it will take another forty years before Americans will forget and send their sons and daughters to die for someone’s folly.

    As for addressing specific evidence, I don’t see much point in going into detail since you and I seem to draw opposite conclusions from the evidence. It’s clear to me we went to war in Iraq based on suspicions that turned out to be wrong, suspicions that should have given cooler heads pause.

    If you want to continue to insist there were WMD and a Saddam/Osama connection, that is certainly your perogative, but even Bush has finally admitted that was not the case. But at least ask yourself this question — why does the White House website continue to throw up these “facts” even after the Presidet has made his admission? I call that propaganda.

    You may well be right about the $150,000 per capita income in 2080. Of course, inflation will make that the equivalent of $15,000 today, and by then, the average American will be working for minimum wage which will still be equivalent of $5.61 an hour. When people work for slave wages, who needs robots? Next will come Soylent Green.

    As for Presidents, I don’t think it’s fair to pin Viet Nam on JFK. While he may have sent a few advisers to Viet Nam, there is plenty of evidence to suggest he had no intention of repeating the French folly. The blame for that rests squarely with LBJ, who we now know invented the Gulf of Tonkin affair to rachet up the war. See, Michael, I’m perfectly willing to admit it isn’t just Republican Presidents who cook the books on war. You should try it; it’s liberating to be freed from dogma.

    We also now know LBJ didn’t want to be the first U.S. President to lose a war. What is it with these guys like LBJ and GWB who’ve never seen action being so callous about sending others to die?

35. lonbud - November 15, 2005 @ 11:08 pm

    Dr. Hathaway knows the White Man’s Burden, though he’s not quite in Kipling’s league expressing it.

36. lonbud - November 15, 2005 @ 11:19 pm

    It must be a Texas thing.

37. Michael Herdegen - November 16, 2005 @ 1:27 am

    lonbud:

    Sticking up for the wogs’ right to litter ?

    While they’re free to trash their own countries, if they see fit, it’s hard to see it as a social good.

    O/T:

    By Nicholas Eberstadt, September 9, 2005

    The most widely quoted federal statistic on deprivation and need in modern America is the ”poverty rate”–a measure tracking households with annual incomes below a ”poverty threshold” established at the beginning of the Johnson administration’s ”war on poverty” in the 1960’s and adjusted over time for inflation. According to the latest poverty rate estimates–released by the Census Bureau on Aug. 30–the total percentage of Americans living in poverty was higher in 2004 (12.7 percent) than in 1974 (11.2 percent). According to that same report, poverty rates for American families and children were likewise higher last year than three decades earlier.

    On its face, this momentous story should have shocked the nation. After all, it suggested (among other alarming things) that Washington’s long and expensive campaign to eliminate domestic poverty has been a colossal failure. So why did that poverty rate report end up mostly buried deep inside daily papers?

    Maybe because many news editors, like policymakers in Washington, know the dirty little secret about the poverty rate: it just isn’t any good. Truth be told, the official poverty rate not only fails to calculate trends in impoverishment with any precision, it even gets the direction wrong.

    The profound flaws in our officially calculated poverty rate are revealed by its very intimation that the poverty situation in America was ”better” in 1974 than it is today. Those of us of a certain age remember the year 1974–in all its recession-plagued, ”stagflation”-burdened glory. But even the most basic facts bearing on poverty alleviation confute the proposition that material circumstances in America are harsher for the vulnerable today than three decades ago. Per capita income adjusted for inflation is over 60 percent higher today than in 1974. The unemployment rate is lower, and the percentage of adults with paying jobs is distinctly higher. Thirty years ago, the proportion of adults without a high school diploma was more than twice as high as today (39 percent versus 16 percent). And antipoverty spending is vastly higher today than in 1974, even after inflation adjustments.

    In the face of such evidence, what do you call an indicator that stubbornly insists that the percentage of Americans below a fixed poverty threshold has increased? How about ”a broken compass?”

    The soundings from the poverty rate are further belied by information on actual living standards for low-income Americans. In 1972-73, for example, just 42 percent of the bottom fifth of American households owned a car; in 2003, almost three-quarters of ”poverty households” had one. By 2001, only 6 percent of ”poverty households” lived in ”crowded” homes (more than one person per room)–down from 26 percent in 1970. By 2003, the fraction of poverty households with central air-conditioning (45 percent) was much higher than the 1980 level for the non-poor (29 percent).

    Besides these living trends, there are what we might call the ”dying trends”: that is to say, America’s health and mortality patterns. All strata of America–including the disadvantaged–are markedly healthier today than three decades ago. Though the officially calculated poverty rate for children was higher in 2004 than 1974 (17.8 percent versus 15.4 percent), the infant mortality rate–that most telling measure of wellbeing–fell by almost three-fifths over those same years, to 6.7 per 1,000 births from 16.7 per 1,000.

38. lonbud - November 16, 2005 @ 8:52 am

    Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether Michael’s problem stems from being on his meds or off them.

    Clearly he believes that we citizens of the United States are endowed with some sort of super-human destiny entitling us — and only us — dominion over anything in the universe we damn well please to exercise dominion over.

    This is our destiny, rooted in our special devotion to free market capitalism, and if all the naysayers would just STFU and get out of the way, it won’t be long before anyone who believes will be living in ultra-modern comfort and security, with plenty of nutritious GM food to eat, fresh, clear water to drink, and helpful robots to fight our wars, dispose of our waste, wipe our asses, and shake the dew off the ends of our pee-pees.

    Michael is the most frightening sort of person to engage because ultimately he does not believe in the interconnectedness of things; he sees only the separateness, and believes in the superiority, of his kind. Everyone else better either get with the program or get out of the way.

    Official government data are the last word on things for which they bolster his opinions — BLS employment data show more people working in America than at any time in our history! Everything is FINE and everyone has PLENTY of cash! AND… a new car!!

    And at least one, if not two, perfectly acceptable, well-paying jobs. If people are not well-clothed and suitably housed, with a large and growing nest-egg in a secure, perfectly-adequate interest bearing account at an efficiently-run financial institution, well, it’s their own damn fault.

    Other government data, which might seem to cast a shade of doubt on his rosy view of things, is rejected out of hand as flawed, inaccurate, and indicative of nothing whatsoever.

    Why, it’s preposterous to think that poverty is any worse today than it was 30 years ago! Look at all the advances in modern medicine and crime control. Per-frickin-capita GNP is over 30K a year, for chrissakes, and if the rheumy, Thunderbird-swilling, n’er-do-well on the corner can’t make it on that, well, why should any public policy take HIS problems into account?

    The only “broken compass” in this debate is Michael’s own moral one.

39. Tam O’Tellico - November 16, 2005 @ 1:44 pm

    Slice the statistics anyway you wish, I have seen and experienced the consequences of Voodoo Economics — I don’t need a government statistician to explain them away.

    The fact is, lower to middle-class families now require at least two incomes to approximate the standard of living that one job provided in the Sixties. And let’s not even talk about the reduction in benefits. Fact is, Voodoo Economics is doing its best to turn us into a Third World nation. Better ready the robots.

    Fact is, the minimum wage hasn’t been raised since 1997. Wanna guess when we last went so long without raising the minimum wage? That’s right, peons, during the Eighties when Reagan and W’s daddy were at the helm.

    “Partially as a consequence of the stagnating minimum wage, the wages of low-wage workers fell significantly during the 1980s. A number of studies have pointed to the decline in the minimum wage as contributing to falling wages and the rise in wage inequality during this period. The purchasing power of the minimum wage fell for 10 consecutive years (prices rose by an average of 5.1% per year). The combination of inflation and government inaction pushed the purchasing power of a minimum wage paycheck lower than it had been in more than three decades.”

    ‘Splain away them statistics, Trickle-Downers!

    Speaking of Trickle-Downers, this morning I met a friend for coffee at the local bakery. He was bitching about someone ruining our town (he has been here barely more than a year) by planning a residential development with typical middle-class density. He fumed that we should be discouraging that sort of development in favor of forty and fifty acre mini-ranches for boomer retirees.

    I asked “But where are these other folks supposed to live?”

    His response: “Somewhere else. Anyway who cares about them?”

    I shook my head and said “That is why you’re a Conservative and I’m a Liberal.”

40. Michael Herdegen - November 16, 2005 @ 7:57 pm

    Clearly he believes that we citizens of the United States are endowed with some sort of super-human destiny entitling us — and only us — dominion over anything in the universe we damn well please to exercise dominion over.

    Not destiny, nor only us.
    It came from good luck and hard effort, as well as by following a set of cultural principles which led to success.
    ANY CULTURE that did as we have done, has prospered.

    We exercise dominion over anything we please because the only other societies and cultures on Earth that can challenge us successfully are our friends.

    That’s what happens when you don’t follow the laws of the Universe, and others do – they end up being your Commander.

    The UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Israel, and Japan all share in the U.S.’ “super-human destiny”.

    This is our destiny, rooted in our special devotion to free market capitalism, and if all the naysayers would just STFU and get out of the way, it won’t be long before anyone who believes will be living in ultra-modern comfort and security, with plenty of nutritious GM food to eat, fresh, clear water to drink, and helpful robots to fight our wars, dispose of our waste, wipe our asses, and shake the dew off the ends of our pee-pees.

    Living in comfort, with plenty of good food and clean water, is bad because… ??

    It would be a big change for most of humanity.

    Michael is the most frightening sort of person to engage because ultimately he does not believe in the interconnectedness of things; he sees only the separateness, and believes in the superiority, of his kind. Everyone else better either get with the program or get out of the way.

    No, not in the least, and you DID NOT get that from a careful reading of what I’ve actually written.

    You are projecting on me something, (or someONE), from your past.

    We have often failed to communicate because you keep attempting to make my words fit some mental script that you’ve already written.

    Official government data are the last word on things for which they bolster his opinions — BLS employment data show more people working in America than at any time in our history! Everything is FINE and everyone has PLENTY of cash! AND… a new car!!

    Yes, that’s true.
    Unemployment among those 20+ years of age, of all races, is 4.4%.

    Things ARE fine.
    You really should read some history, and then you’d understand what “not fine” actually looks like.

    Try, for instance, the 30s, 70s, and early 80s.

    And at least one, if not two, perfectly acceptable, well-paying jobs. If people are not well-clothed and suitably housed, with a large and growing nest-egg in a secure, perfectly-adequate interest bearing account at an efficiently-run financial institution, well, it’s their own damn fault.

    Yes, often it is.
    These things aren’t brain surgery, they’re the basic skills that a competent adult applies to her life.

    While bad luck can strike anyone, becoming unemployed by choice, spending all discretionary income on frivolities, or not pursuing education or job training are NOT “bad luck”, they’re bad CHOICES.

    Other government data, which might seem to cast a shade of doubt on his rosy view of things, is rejected out of hand as flawed, inaccurate, and indicative of nothing whatsoever.

    Again, while addressing me, you’re actually speaking of somebody else.

    Why, it’s preposterous to think that poverty is any worse today than it was 30 years ago! Look at all the advances in modern medicine and crime control. Per-frickin-capita GNP is over 30K a year, for chrissakes, and if the rheumy, Thunderbird-swilling, n’er-do-well on the corner can’t make it on that, well, why should any public policy take HIS problems into account?

    We’ve always had rheumy, Thunderbird-swilling, n’er-do-wells on corners, and we always will.

    However, they’ve never made up the majority of the poverty-stricken, so the question is, is anyone else living in poverty ?

    Increasingly, the answer is no.

    The only “broken compass” in this debate is Michael’s own moral one.

    Well, I see that’s I’ve worn out my welcome.

    I had fun.

    Viva mucho tiempo y prospere. Vaya con Dios.

41. lonbud - November 16, 2005 @ 9:07 pm

    Well, I see that’s I’ve worn out my welcome.

    Not at all, Michael, and I hope you will reconsider what appears to be an intention to abandon the conversation here. The overwhelming majority of your posts are thoughtful, well-written, and speak of a clear, if somewhat unforgiving view of the world.

    As the blogmeister, I have always welcomed your voice and wish others of a view and mindset similar to yours would join the fray.

42. Tam O’Tellico - November 17, 2005 @ 5:16 am

    Michael,

    I certainly hope you stick around to express your point of view. Even though that viewpoint is in the minority here, you represent it well, and we all need our views challenged by the capable rather than ignored by the unthinking. You must realize by now that you will mostly be disagreed with here, but I offer you words of wisdom I’ve come to live by since I am a married man:

    If you and I always agree, one of us isn’t necessary.

43. Bubbles - November 17, 2005 @ 12:42 pm

    Michael,

    As a sailor all I can add is (to your credit) you’ve been sailing upwind into the teeth of a storm. There exists the other-side of that weather front but on the course you’ve set you’ve got to go through the worst of that shit to get there.

    To carry the analogy a bit further you have three choices -period-.

    1) Hold your course, risk the vessel your life and the life of your crew. This may turn out to be the shortest path to smooth sailing. They call that ‘weathering the storm’.

    2) Execute a very risky turn that if executed successfully will blow you 180 degrees off course, will quickly reduce everyone’s discomfort but it carries other very serious risks (like taking your rig down/sinking) if you a) get on the wrong side of a trailing sea or b) let your concentration lapse and do an un-forced jibe.

    3) Fall-off the wind, do a broad-reach across the wind. Hope that the storm doesn’t change course too and follow you but a) make some headway on your course and b) reduce the load on your rig and crew.

44. Tam O’Tellico - November 18, 2005 @ 7:40 am

    I used to jokingly refer to Dick Cheney as the Anti-Christ; I’m no longer joking. In the ultimate example of “it takes one to know one”, Dick Cheney calls administration critics “dishonest reprehensible opportunists”. This from a man who knows no bottom himself – which may be why Brent Scowcroft recently said of his former long-time friend “I don’t know Dick Cheney.”

    Talk about “dishonest reprehensible opportunists “, the latest example is the no-bid contracts that allow the KBR division of Halliburton to employ illegal aliens under substandard conditions in the Katrina clean-up. And just for evil measure, Davis-Bacon requirements were set aside in order to maximize profits. This mission despicable is accomplished through the thin disguise of “sub-contractors”.

    I learned all about this “sub-contractor” ruse when I lived in Florida; Coca-Cola routinely used it to get migrants to pick their citrus. The press eventually exposed the slave wages and inhuman living conditions Coca-Cola turned a blind eye to, and even “right to work” Florida had to put a stop to that evil.

    But not Washington, and not Halliburton, and not Cheney – for these there is no bottom, and with these capitalism is no better than the Hobbesian jungle government is supposed to prevent. There simply is no human misery these bastards won’t take advantage of.

    Meanwhile, the beat-down goes on and the big boys blame the beat-on for taking the beating. Conservatives play the “blame the niggers” game. It’s their fault they live in abject poverty; it’s their fault ‘cause they don’t want to work; it’s their fault ‘cause they’re addicted to the government dole. In the name of all that’s human and holy, what are these no-bid Halliburton contracts if not a government dole?

    Dick Cheney is a master of manipulator adept at twisting words. Well, “dishonest reprehensible opportunists” reminds me of “nattering, nabobs of negativism”. And speaking of Spiro Agnew, at least he only stole groceries; Dick Cheney has hijacked the store, the warehouse and anything else he could hide under his umbrella of no-bid contracts.

    Dick Nixon, Dick Armey, Dick Cheney — maybe they should pass a law keeping Dicks out of Washington.

45. lonbud - November 18, 2005 @ 8:18 am

    Priceless, Tam O; well-said and sad, but true.

    And speaking of Spiro Agnew, I wonder how many people noticed that Dubya was quoted using the word “pernicious” correctly in a sentence yesterday.

    Once again, the call goes out for Dandy Don Meredith; it’s time to sing “Turn Out The Lights.”

46. Tam O’Tellico - November 19, 2005 @ 8:54 am

    Read it and weep:

    The Man Who Sold the War
    By James Bamford
    Rolling Stone

    Thursday 17 November 2005

    The road to war in Iraq led through many unlikely places. One of them was a chic hotel nestled among the strip bars and brothels that cater to foreigners in the town of Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand.

    On December 17th, 2001, in a small room within the sound of the crashing tide, a CIA officer attached metal electrodes to the ring and index fingers of a man sitting pensively in a padded chair. The officer then stretched a black rubber tube, pleated like an accordion, around the man’s chest and another across his abdomen. Finally, he slipped a thick cuff over the man’s brachial artery, on the inside of his upper arm.

    Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein. For hours, as thin mechanical styluses traced black lines on rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out an explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a series of questions, he insisted repeatedly that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam’s men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad.

    It was damning stuff – just the kind of evidence the Bush administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they would offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That’s why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

    There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of the sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa.

    The fabrication might have ended there, the tale of another political refugee trying to scheme his way to a better life. But just because the story wasn’t true didn’t mean it couldn’t be put to good use. Al-Haideri, in fact, was the product of a clandestine operation – part espionage, part PR campaign – that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling the world a war. And the man who had long been in charge of the marketing was a secretive and mysterious creature of the Washington establishment named John Rendon.

    Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know exists. Two months before al-Haideri took the lie-detector test, the Pentagon had secretly awarded him a $16 million contract to target Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda. One of the most powerful people in Washington, Rendon is a leader in the strategic field known as “perception management,” manipulating information – and, by extension, the news media – to achieve the desired result. His firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help “create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power.” Working under this extraordinary transfer of secret authority, Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name – the Iraqi National Congress – and served as their media guru and “senior adviser” as they set out to engineer an uprising against Saddam. It was as if President John F. Kennedy had outsourced the Bay of Pigs operation to the advertising and public-relations firm of J. Walter Thompson.

    “They’re very closemouthed about what they do,” says Kevin McCauley, an editor of the industry trade publication O’Dwyer’s PR Daily. “It’s all cloak-and-dagger stuff.”

    Although Rendon denies any direct involvement with al-Haideri, the defector was the latest salvo in a secret media war set in motion by Rendon. In an operation directed by Ahmad Chalabi – the man Rendon helped install as leader of the INC – the defector had been brought to Thailand, where he huddled in a hotel room for days with the group’s spokesman, Zaab Sethna. The INC routinely coached defectors on their stories, prepping them for polygraph exams, and Sethna was certainly up to the task – he got his training in the art of propaganda on the payroll of the Rendon Group. According to Francis Brooke, the INC’s man in Washington and himself a former Rendon employee, the goal of the al-Haideri operation was simple: pressure the United States to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein.

    As the CIA official flew back to Washington with failed lie-detector charts in his briefcase, Chalabi and Sethna didn’t hesitate. They picked up the phone, called two journalists who had a long history of helping the INC promote its cause and offered them an exclusive on Saddam’s terrifying cache of WMDs.

    For the worldwide broadcast rights, Sethna contacted Paul Moran, an Australian freelancer who frequently worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “I think I’ve got something that you would be interested in,” he told Moran, who was living in Bahrain. Sethna knew he could count on the trim, thirty-eight-year-old journalist: A former INC employee in the Middle East, Moran had also been on Rendon’s payroll for years in “information operations,” working with Sethna at the company’s London office on Catherine Place, near Buckingham Palace.

    “We were trying to help the Kurds and the Iraqis opposed to Saddam set up a television station,” Sethna recalled in a rare interview broadcast on Australian television. “The Rendon Group came to us and said, ‘We have a contract to kind of do anti-Saddam propaganda on behalf of the Iraqi opposition.’ What we didn’t know – what the Rendon Group didn’t tell us – was in fact it was the CIA that had hired them to do this work.”

    The INC’s choice for the worldwide print exclusive was equally easy: Chalabi contacted Judith Miller of The New York Times. Miller, who was close to I. Lewis Libby and other neoconservatives in the Bush administration, had been a trusted outlet for the INC’s anti-Saddam propaganda for years. Not long after the CIA polygraph expert slipped the straps and electrodes off al-Haideri and declared him a liar, Miller flew to Bangkok to interview him under the watchful supervision of his INC handlers. Miller later made perfunctory calls to the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, but despite her vaunted intelligence sources, she claimed not to know about the results of al-Haideri’s lie-detector test. Instead, she reported that unnamed “government experts” called his information “reliable and significant” – thus adding a veneer of truth to the lies.

    Her front-page story, which hit the stands on December 20th, 2001, was exactly the kind of exposure Rendon had been hired to provide. AN IRAQI DEFECTOR TELLS OF WORK ON AT LEAST 20 HIDDEN WEAPONS SITES, declared the headline. “An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer,” Miller wrote, “said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago.” If verified, she noted, “his allegations would provide ammunition to officials within the Bush administration who have been arguing that Mr. Hussein should be driven from power partly because of his unwillingness to stop making weapons of mass destruction, despite his pledges to do so.”

    For months, hawks inside and outside the administration had been pressing for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq. Now, thanks to Miller’s story, they could point to “proof” of Saddam’s “nuclear threat.” The story, reinforced by Moran’s on-camera interview with al-Haideri on the giant Australian Broadcasting Corp., was soon being trumpeted by the White House and repeated by newspapers and television networks around the world. It was the first in a long line of hyped and fraudulent stories that would eventually propel the U.S. into a war with Iraq – the first war based almost entirely on a covert propaganda campaign targeting the media.

    By law, the Bush administration is expressly prohibited from disseminating government propaganda at home. But in an age of global communications, there is nothing to stop it from planting a phony pro-war story overseas – knowing with certainty that it will reach American citizens almost instantly. A recent congressional report suggests that the Pentagon may be relying on “covert psychological operations affecting audiences within friendly nations.” In a “secret amendment” to Pentagon policy, the report warns, “psyops funds might be used to publish stories favorable to American policies, or hire outside contractors without obvious ties to the Pentagon to organize rallies in support of administration policies.” The report also concludes that military planners are shifting away from the Cold War view that power comes from superior weapons systems. Instead, the Pentagon now believes that “combat power can be enhanced by communications networks and technologies that control access to, and directly manipulate, information. As a result, information itself is now both a tool and a target of warfare.”

    It is a belief John Rendon encapsulated in a speech to cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1996. “I am not a national-security strategist or a military tactician,” he declared. “I am a politician, a person who uses communication to meet public-policy or corporate-policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager.” To explain his philosophy, Rendon paraphrased a journalist he knew from his days as a staffer on the presidential campaigns of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter: “This is probably best described in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, when he wrote, ‘When things turn weird, the weird turn pro.'”

    John Walter Rendon Jr. rises at 3 a.m. each morning after six hours of sleep, turns on his Apple computer and begins ingesting information – overnight news reports, e-mail messages, foreign and domestic newspapers, and an assortment of government documents, many of them available only to those with the highest security clearance. According to Pentagon documents obtained by Rolling Stone, the Rendon Group is authorized “to research and analyze information classified up to Top Secret/SCI/SI/TK/G/HCS” – an extraordinarily high level of clearance granted to only a handful of defense contractors. “SCI” stands for Sensitive Compartmented Information, data classified higher than Top Secret. “SI” is Special Intelligence, very secret communications intercepted by the National Security Agency. “TK” refers to Talent/Keyhole, code names for imagery from reconnaissance aircraft and spy satellites. “G” stands for Gamma (communications intercepts from extremely sensitive sources) and “HCS” means Humint Control System (information from a very sensitive human source). Taken together, the acronyms indicate that Rendon enjoys access to the most secret information from all three forms of intelligence collection: eavesdropping, imaging satellites and human spies.

    Rendon lives in a multimillion-dollar home in Washington’s exclusive Kalorama neighborhood. A few doors down from Rendon is the home of former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara; just around the corner lives current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. At fifty-six, Rendon wears owlish glasses and combs his thick mane of silver-gray hair to the side, Kennedy-style. He heads to work each morning clad in a custom-made shirt with his monogram on the right cuff and a sharply tailored blue blazer that hangs loose around his bulky frame. By the time he pulls up to the Rendon Group’s headquarters near Dupont Circle, he has already racked up a handsome fee for the morning’s work: According to federal records, Rendon charges the CIA and the Pentagon $311.26 an hour for his services.

    Rendon is one of the most influential of the private contractors in Washington who are increasingly taking over jobs long reserved for highly trained CIA employees. In recent years, spies-for-hire have begun to replace regional desk officers, who control clandestine operations around the world; watch officers at the agency’s twenty-four-hour crisis center; analysts, who sift through reams of intelligence data; and even counterintelligence officers in the field, who oversee meetings between agents and their recruited spies. According to one senior administration official involved in intelligence-budget decisions, half of the CIA’s work is now performed by private contractors – people completely unaccountable to Congress. Another senior budget official acknowledges privately that lawmakers have no idea how many rent-a-spies the CIA currently employs – or how much unchecked power they enjoy.

    Unlike many newcomers to the field, however, Rendon is a battle-tested veteran who has been secretly involved in nearly every American shooting conflict in the past two decades. In the first interview he has granted in decades, Rendon offered a peek through the keyhole of this seldom-seen world of corporate spooks – a rarefied but growing profession. Over a dinner of lamb chops and a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape at a private Washington club, Rendon was guarded about the details of his clandestine work – but he boasted openly of the sweep and importance of his firm’s efforts as a for-profit spy. “We’ve worked in ninety-one countries,” he said. “Going all the way back to Panama, we’ve been involved in every war, with the exception of Somalia.”

    It is an unusual career twist for someone who entered politics as an opponent of the Vietnam War. The son of a stockbroker, Rendon grew up in New Jersey and stumped for McGovern before graduating from Northeastern University. “I was the youngest state coordinator,” he recalls. “I had Maine. They told me that I understood politics – which was a stretch, being so young.” Rendon, who went on to serve as executive director of the Democratic National Committee, quickly mastered the combination of political skulduggery and media manipulation that would become his hallmark. In 1980, as the manager of Jimmy Carter’s troops at the national convention in New York, he was sitting alone in the bleachers at Madison Square Garden when a reporter for ABC News approached him. “They actually did a little piece about the man behind the curtain,” Rendon says. “A Wizard of Oz thing.” It was a role he would end up playing for the rest of his life.

    After Carter lost the election and the hard-right Reagan revolutionaries came to power in 1981, Rendon went into business with his younger brother Rick. “Everybody started consulting,” he recalls. “We started consulting.” They helped elect John Kerry to the Senate in 1984 and worked for the AFL-CIO to mobilize the union vote for Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign. Among the items Rendon produced was a training manual for union organizers to operate as political activists on behalf of Mondale. To keep the operation quiet, Rendon stamped CONFIDENTIAL on the cover of each of the blue plastic notebooks. It was a penchant for secrecy that would soon pervade all of his consulting deals.

    To a large degree, the Rendon Group is a family affair. Rendon’s wife, Sandra Libby, handles the books as chief financial officer and “senior communications strategist.” Rendon’s brother Rick serves as senior partner and runs the company’s Boston office, producing public-service announcements for the Whale Conservation Institute and coordinating Empower Peace, a campaign that brings young people in the Middle East in contact with American kids through video-conferencing technology. But the bulk of the company’s business is decidedly less liberal and peace oriented. Rendon’s first experience in the intelligence world, in fact, came courtesy of the Republicans. “Panama,” he says, “brought us into the national-security environment.”

    In 1989, shortly after his election, President George H.W. Bush signed a highly secret “finding” authorizing the CIA to funnel $10 million to opposition forces in Panama to overthrow Gen. Manuel Noriega. Reluctant to involve agency personnel directly, the CIA turned to the Rendon Group. Rendon’s job was to work behind the scenes, using a variety of campaign and psychological techniques to put the CIA’s choice, Guillermo Endara, into the presidential palace. Cash from the agency, laundered through various bank accounts and front organizations, would end up in Endara’s hands, who would then pay Rendon.

    A heavyset, fifty-three-year-old corporate attorney with little political experience, Endara was running against Noriega’s handpicked choice, Carlos Duque. With Rendon’s help, Endara beat Duque decisively at the polls – but Noriega simply named himself “Maximum Leader” and declared the election null and void. The Bush administration then decided to remove Noriega by force – and Rendon’s job shifted from generating local support for a national election to building international support for regime change. Within days he had found the ultimate propaganda tool.

    At the end of a rally in support of Endara, a band of Noriega’s Dignity Battalion – nicknamed “Dig Bats” and called “Doberman thugs” by Bush – attacked the crowd with wooden planks, metal pipes and guns. Gang members grabbed the bodyguard of Guillermo Ford, one of Endara’s vice-presidential candidates, pushed him against a car, shoved a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. With cameras snapping, the Dig Bats turned on Ford, batting his head with a spike-tipped metal rod and pounding him with heavy clubs, turning his white guayabera bright red with blood – his own, and that of his dead bodyguard.

    Within hours, Rendon made sure the photos reached every newsroom in the world. The next week an image of the violence made the cover of Time magazine with the caption POLITICS PANAMA STYLE: NORIEGA BLUDGEONS HIS OPPOSITION, AND THE U.S. TURNS UP THE HEAT. To further boost international support for Endara, Rendon escorted Ford on a tour of Europe to meet British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Italian prime minister and even the pope. In December 1989, when Bush decided to invade Panama, Rendon and several of his employees were on one of the first military jets headed to Panama City.

    “I arrived fifteen minutes before it started,” Rendon recalls. “My first impression is having the pilot in the plane turn around and say, ‘Excuse me, sir, but if you look off to the left you’ll see the attack aircraft circling before they land.’ Then I remember this major saying, ‘Excuse me, sir, but do you know what the air-defense capability of Panama is at the moment?’ I leaned into the cockpit and said, ‘Look, major, I hope by now that’s no longer an issue.'”

    Moments later, Rendon’s plane landed at Howard Air Force Base in Panama. “I needed to get to Fort Clayton, which was where the president was,” he says. “I was choppered over – and we took some rounds on the way.” There, on a U.S. military base surrounded by 24,000 U.S. troops, heavy tanks and Combat Talon AC-130 gunships, Rendon’s client, Endara, was at last sworn in as president of Panama.

    Rendon’s involvement in the campaign to oust Saddam Hussein began seven months later, in July 1990. Rendon had taken time out for a vacation – a long train ride across Scotland – when he received an urgent call. “Soldiers are massing at the border outside of Kuwait,” he was told. At the airport, he watched the beginning of the Iraqi invasion on television. Winging toward Washington in the first-class cabin of a Pan Am 747, Rendon spent the entire flight scratching an outline of his ideas in longhand on a yellow legal pad.

    “I wrote a memo about what the Kuwaitis were going to face, and I based it on our experience in Panama and the experience of the Free French operation in World War II,” Rendon says. “This was something that they needed to see and hear, and that was my whole intent. Go over, tell the Kuwaitis, ‘Here’s what you’ve got – here’s some observations, here’s some recommendations, live long and prosper.'”

    Back in Washington, Rendon immediately called Hamilton Jordan, the former chief of staff to President Carter and an old friend from his Democratic Party days. “He put me in touch with the Saudis, the Saudis put me in touch with the Kuwaitis and then I went over and had a meeting with the Kuwaitis,” Rendon recalls. “And by the time I landed back in the United States, I got a phone call saying, ‘Can you come back? We want you to do what’s in the memo.'”

    What the Kuwaitis wanted was help in selling a war of liberation to the American government – and the American public. Rendon proposed a massive “perception management” campaign designed to convince the world of the need to join forces to rescue Kuwait. Working through an organization called Citizens for a Free Kuwait, the Kuwaiti government in exile agreed to pay Rendon $100,000 a month for his assistance.

    To coordinate the operation, Rendon opened an office in London. Once the Gulf War began, he remained extremely busy trying to prevent the American press from reporting on the dark side of the Kuwaiti government, an autocratic oil-tocracy ruled by a family of wealthy sheiks. When newspapers began reporting that many Kuwaitis were actually living it up in nightclubs in Cairo as Americans were dying in the Kuwaiti sand, the Rendon Group quickly counterattacked. Almost instantly, a wave of articles began appearing telling the story of grateful Kuwaitis mailing 20,000 personally signed valentines to American troops on the front lines, all arranged by Rendon.

    Rendon also set up an elaborate television and radio network, and developed programming that was beamed into Kuwait from Taif, Saudi Arabia. “It was important that the Kuwaitis in occupied Kuwait understood that the rest of the world was doing something,” he says. Each night, Rendon’s troops in London produced a script and sent it via microwave to Taif, ensuring that the “news” beamed into Kuwait reflected a sufficiently pro-American line.

    When it comes to staging a war, few things are left to chance. After Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, it was Rendon’s responsibility to make the victory march look like the flag-waving liberation of France after World War II. “Did you ever stop to wonder,” he later remarked, “how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American – and, for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries?” After a pause, he added, “Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then.”

    Although his work is highly secret, Rendon insists he deals only in “timely, truthful and accurate information.” His job, he says, is to counter false perceptions that the news media perpetuate because they consider it “more important to be first than to be right.” In modern warfare, he believes, the outcome depends largely on the public’s perception of the war – whether it is winnable, whether it is worth the cost. “We are being haunted and stalked by the difference between perception and reality,” he says. “Because the lines are divergent, this difference between perception and reality is one of the greatest strategic communications challenges of war.”

    By the time the Gulf War came to a close in 1991, the Rendon Group was firmly established as Washington’s leading salesman for regime change. But Rendon’s new assignment went beyond simply manipulating the media. After the war ended, the Top Secret order signed by President Bush to oust Hussein included a rare “lethal finding” – meaning deadly action could be taken if necessary. Under contract to the CIA, Rendon was charged with helping to create a dissident force with the avowed purpose of violently overthrowing the entire Iraqi government. It is an undertaking that Rendon still considers too classified to discuss. “That’s where we’re wandering into places I’m not going to talk about,” he says. “If you take an oath, it should mean something.”

    Thomas Twetten, the CIA’s former deputy of operations, credits Rendon with virtually creating the INC. “The INC was clueless,” he once observed. “They needed a lot of help and didn’t know where to start. That is why Rendon was brought in.” Acting as the group’s senior adviser and aided by truckloads of CIA dollars, Rendon pulled together a wide spectrum of Iraqi dissidents and sponsored a conference in Vienna to organize them into an umbrella organization, which he dubbed the Iraqi National Congress. Then, as in Panama, his assignment was to help oust a brutal dictator and replace him with someone chosen by the CIA. “The reason they got the contract was because of what they had done in Panama – so they were known,” recalls Whitley Bruner, former chief of the CIA’s station in Baghdad. This time the target was Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the agency’s successor of choice was Ahmad Chalabi, a crafty, avuncular Iraqi exile beloved by Washington’s neoconservatives.

    Chalabi was a curious choice to lead a rebellion. In 1992, he was convicted in Jordan of making false statements and embezzling $230 million from his own bank, for which he was sentenced in absentia to twenty-two years of hard labor. But the only credential that mattered was his politics. “From day one,” Rendon says, “Chalabi was very clear that his biggest interest was to rid Iraq of Saddam.” Bruner, who dealt with Chalabi and Rendon in London in 1991, puts it even more bluntly. “Chalabi’s primary focus,” he said later, “was to drag us into a war.”

    The key element of Rendon’s INC operation was a worldwide media blitz designed to turn Hussein, a once dangerous but now contained regional leader, into the greatest threat to world peace. Each month, $326,000 was passed from the CIA to the Rendon Group and the INC via various front organizations. Rendon profited handsomely, receiving a “management fee” of ten percent above what it spent on the project. According to some reports, the company made nearly $100 million on the contract during the five years following the Gulf War.

    Rendon made considerable headway with the INC, but following the group’s failed coup attempt against Saddam in 1996, the CIA lost confidence in Chalabi and cut off his monthly paycheck. But Chalabi and Rendon simply switched sides, moving over to the Pentagon, and the money continued to flow. “The Rendon Group is not in great odor in Langley these days,” notes Bruner. “Their contracts are much more with the Defense Department.”

    Rendon’s influence rose considerably in Washington after the terrorist attacks of September 11th. In a single stroke, Osama bin Laden altered the world’s perception of reality – and in an age of nonstop information, whoever controls perception wins. What Bush needed to fight the War on Terror was a skilled information warrior – and Rendon was widely acknowledged as the best. “The events of 11 September 2001 changed everything, not least of which was the administration’s outlook concerning strategic influence,” notes one Army report. “Faced with direct evidence that many people around the world actively hated the United States, Bush began taking action to more effectively explain U.S. policy overseas. Initially the White House and DoD turned to the Rendon Group.”

    Three weeks after the September 11th attacks, according to documents obtained from defense sources, the Pentagon awarded a large contract to the Rendon Group. Around the same time, Pentagon officials also set up a highly secret organization called the Office of Strategic Influence. Part of the OSI’s mission was to conduct covert disinformation and deception operations – planting false news items in the media and hiding their origins. “It’s sometimes valuable from a military standpoint to be able to engage in deception with respect to future anticipated plans,” Vice President Dick Cheney said in explaining the operation. Even the military’s top brass found the clandestine unit unnerving. “When I get their briefings, it’s scary,” a senior official said at the time.

    In February 2002, The New York Times reported that the Pentagon had hired Rendon “to help the new office,” a charge Rendon denies. “We had nothing to do with that,” he says. “We were not in their reporting chain. We were reporting directly to the J-3” – the head of operations at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Following the leak, Rumsfeld was forced to shut down the organization. But much of the office’s operations were apparently shifted to another unit, deeper in the Pentagon’s bureaucracy, called the Information Operations Task Force, and Rendon was closely connected to this group. “Greg Newbold was the J-3 at the time, and we reported to him through the IOTF,” Rendon says.

    According to the Pentagon documents, the Rendon Group played a major role in the IOTF. The company was charged with creating an “Information War Room” to monitor worldwide news reports at lightning speed and respond almost instantly with counterpropaganda. A key weapon, according to the documents, was Rendon’s “proprietary state-of-the-art news-wire collection system called ‘Livewire,’ which takes real-time news-wire reports, as they are filed, before they are on the Internet, before CNN can read them on the air and twenty-four hours before they appear in the morning newspapers, and sorts them by keyword. The system provides the most current real-time access to news and information available to private or public organizations.”

    The top target that the pentagon assigned to Rendon was the Al-Jazeera television network. The contract called for the Rendon Group to undertake a massive “media mapping” campaign against the news organization, which the Pentagon considered “critical to U.S. objectives in the War on Terrorism.” According to the contract, Rendon would provide a “detailed content analysis of the station’s daily broadcast . . . [and] identify the biases of specific journalists and potentially obtain an understanding of their allegiances, including the possibility of specific relationships and sponsorships.”

    The secret targeting of foreign journalists may have had a sinister purpose. Among the missions proposed for the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence was one to “coerce” foreign journalists and plant false information overseas. Secret briefing papers also said the office should find ways to “punish” those who convey the “wrong message.” One senior officer told CNN that the plan would “formalize government deception, dishonesty and misinformation.”

    According to the Pentagon documents, Rendon would use his media analysis to conduct a worldwide propaganda campaign, deploying teams of information warriors to allied nations to assist them “in developing and delivering specific messages to the local population, combatants, front-line states, the media and the international community.” Among the places Rendon’s info-war teams would be sent were Jakarta, Indonesia; Islamabad, Pakistan; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Cairo; Ankara, Turkey; and Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The teams would produce and script television news segments “built around themes and story lines supportive of U.S. policy objectives.”

    Rendon was also charged with engaging in “military deception” online – an activity once assigned to the OSI. The company was contracted to monitor Internet chat rooms in both English and Arabic – and “participate in these chat rooms when/if tasked.” Rendon would also create a Web site “with regular news summaries and feature articles. Targeted at the global public, in English and at least four (4) additional languages, this activity also will include an extensive e-mail push operation.” These techniques are commonly used to plant a variety of propaganda, including false information.

    Still another newly formed propaganda operation in which Rendon played a major part was the Office of Global Communications, which operated out of the White House and was charged with spreading the administration’s message on the War in Iraq. Every morning at 9:30, Rendon took part in the White House OGC conference call, where officials would discuss the theme of the day and who would deliver it. The office also worked closely with the White House Iraq Group, whose high-level members, including recently indicted Cheney chief of staff Lewis Libby, were responsible for selling the war to the American public.

    Never before in history had such an extensive secret network been established to shape the entire world’s perception of a war. “It was not just bad intelligence – it was an orchestrated effort,” says Sam Gardner, a retired Air Force colonel who has taught strategy and military operations at the National War College. “It began before the war, was a major effort during the war and continues as post-conflict distortions.”

    In the first weeks following the September 11th attacks, Rendon operated at a frantic pitch. “In the early stages it was fielding every ground ball that was coming, because nobody was sure if we were ever going to be attacked again,” he says. “It was ‘What do you know about this, what do you know about that, what else can you get, can you talk to somebody over here?’ We functioned twenty-four hours a day. We maintained situational awareness, in military terms, on all things related to terrorism. We were doing 195 newspapers and 43 countries in fourteen or fifteen languages. If you do this correctly, I can tell you what’s on the evening news tonight in a country before it happens. I can give you, as a policymaker, a six-hour break on how you can affect what’s going to be on the news. They’ll take that in a heartbeat.”

    The Bush administration took everything Rendon had to offer. Between 2000 and 2004, Pentagon documents show, the Rendon Group received at least thirty-five contracts with the Defense Department, worth a total of $50 million to $100 million.

    The mourners genuflected, made the sign of the cross and took their seats along the hard, shiny pews of Our Lady of Victories Catholic Church. It was April 2nd, 2003 – the start of fall in the small Australian town of Glenelg, an aging beach resort of white Victorian homes and soft, blond sand on Holdback Bay. Rendon had flown halfway around the world to join nearly 600 friends and family who were gathered to say farewell to a local son and amateur football champ, Paul Moran. Three days into the invasion of Iraq, the freelance journalist and Rendon employee had become the first member of the media to be killed in the war – a war he had covertly helped to start.

    Moran had lived a double life, filing reports for the Australian Broadcasting Corp. and other news organizations, while at other times operating as a clandestine agent for Rendon, enjoying what his family calls his “James Bond lifestyle.” Moran had trained Iraqi opposition forces in photographic espionage, showing them how to covertly document Iraqi military activities, and had produced pro-war announcements for the Pentagon. “He worked for the Rendon Group in London,” says his mother, Kathleen. “They just send people all over the world – where there are wars.”

    Moran was covering the Iraq invasion for ABC, filming at a Kurdish-controlled checkpoint in the city of Sulaymaniyah, when a car driven by a suicide bomber blew up next to him. “I saw the car in a kind of slow-motion disintegrate,” recalls Eric Campbell, a correspondent who was filming with Moran. “A soldier handed me a passport, which was charred. That’s when I knew Paul was dead.”

    As the Mass ended and Moran’s Australian-flag-draped coffin passed by the mourners, Rendon lifted his right arm and saluted. He refused to discuss Moran’s role in the company, saying only that “Paul worked for us on a number of projects.” But on the long flight back to Washington, across more than a dozen time zones, Rendon outlined his feelings in an e-mail: “The day did begin with dark and ominous clouds much befitting the emotions we all felt – sadness and anger at the senseless violence that claimed our comrade Paul Moran ten short days ago and many decades of emotion ago.”

    The Rendon Group also organized a memorial service in London, where Moran first went to work for the company in 1990. Held at Home House, a private club in Portman Square where Moran often stayed while visiting the city, the event was set among photographs of Moran in various locations around the Middle East. Zaab Sethna, who organized the al-Haideri media exclusive in Thailand for Moran and Judith Miller, gave a touching tribute to his former colleague. “I think that on both a personal and professional level Paul was deeply admired and loved by the people at the Rendon Group,” Sethna later said.

    Although Moran was gone, the falsified story about weapons of mass destruction that he and Sethna had broadcast around the world lived on. Seven months earlier, as President Bush was about to argue his case for war before the U.N., the White House had given prominent billing to al-Haideri’s fabricated charges. In a report ironically titled “Iraq: Denial and Deception,” the administration referred to al-Haideri by name and detailed his allegations – even though the CIA had already determined them to be lies. The report was placed on the White House Web site on September 12th, 2002, and remains there today. One version of the report even credits Miller’s article for the information.

    Miller also continued to promote al-Haideri’s tale of Saddam’s villainy. In January 2003, more than a year after her first article appeared, Miller again reported that Pentagon “intelligence officials” were telling her that “some of the most valuable information has come from Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri.” His interviews with the Defense Intelligence Agency, Miller added, “ultimately resulted in dozens of highly credible reports on Iraqi weapons-related activity and purchases, officials said.”

    Finally, in early 2004, more than two years after he made the dramatic allegations to Miller and Moran about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, al-Haideri was taken back to Iraq by the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group. On a wide-ranging trip through Baghdad and other key locations, al-Haideri was given the opportunity to point out exactly where Saddam’s stockpiles were hidden, confirming the charges that had helped to start a war.

    In the end, he could not identify a single site where illegal weapons were buried.

    As the war in Iraq has spiraled out of control, the Bush administration’s covert propaganda campaign has intensified. According to a secret Pentagon report personally approved by Rumsfeld in October 2003 and obtained by Rolling Stone, the Strategic Command is authorized to engage in “military deception” – defined as “presenting false information, images or statements.” The seventy-four-page document, titled “Information Operations Roadmap,” also calls for psychological operations to be launched over radio, television, cell phones and “emerging technologies” such as the Internet. In addition to being classified secret, the road map is also stamped noforn, meaning it cannot be shared even with our allies.

    As the acknowledged general of such propaganda warfare, Rendon insists that the work he does is for the good of all Americans. “For us, it’s a question of patriotism,” he says. “It’s not a question of politics, and that’s an important distinction. I feel very strongly about that personally. If brave men and women are going to be put in harm’s way, they deserve support.” But in Iraq, American troops and Iraqi civilians were put in harm’s way, in large part, by the false information spread by Rendon and the men he trained in information warfare. And given the rapid growth of what is known as the “security-intelligence complex” in Washington, covert perception managers are likely to play an increasingly influential role in the wars of the future.

    Indeed, Rendon is already thinking ahead. Last year, he attended a conference on information operations in London, where he offered an assessment on the Pentagon’s efforts to manipulate the media. According to those present, Rendon applauded the practice of embedding journalists with American forces. “He said the embedded idea was great,” says an Air Force colonel who attended the talk. “It worked as they had found in the test. It was the war version of reality television, and for the most part they did not lose control of the story.” But Rendon also cautioned that individual news organizations were often able to “take control of the story,” shaping the news before the Pentagon asserted its spin on the day’s events.

    “We lost control of the context,” Rendon warned. “That has to be fixed for the next war.”